Introduction

In this chapter we analyse how racialised differences have been represented in artistic practice in Colombia, as well as the relationships between Black, brown and Indigenous artists and the art world. The first two sections of the chapter begin with a brief look at the colonial period and focus on the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth: for these periods we address the representation and participation of Black and Indigenous people. We take examples from visual arts and literature – plus music and dance for the early to mid twentieth century – as realms in which racial difference featured in readily identifiable ways. We show how white and mestizo artists tended to represent racialised subalterns in ways tinged with ‘primitivism’ and paternalism – although some displayed socialist sympathies in depictions of social inequality, in which such subalterns appeared as oppressed workers, without racism coming into clear view as a social issue.Footnote ¹ However, by the 1930s and 40s, Black artists and writers were using their practice to critique social inequalities in which racism was identified as an important component. In the third section of the chapter, we turn our attention entirely to Black art practice – primarily music and visual arts, but also touching on oral literature and film – and we analyse its increasing politicisation from mid century, which was linked to international currents such as Négritude and Black Power. Also important was the burgeoning Black social movement in the country, which had incipient expressions in the late 1960s and gathered strength with Colombia’s 1991 constitutional reform and multiculturalist turn. The fourth section of the chapter focuses on the period since 2000 and explores the work of the Colombian artists – mostly but not exclusively Black – who collaborated with us in the CARLA (Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America) project; our aim is to show how their diverse art practices have addressed racism in increasingly direct ways.Footnote ²

From Colonial New Granada to Twentieth-Century Colombia

The focus of this section is on the way racial difference figured in the Colombian art world from the creation of the new republic in 1810 until the mid twentieth century, that is, during the long and varied nation-building processes that included the early establishment of key national institutions and a later period of modernising industrialisation and national integration. First, however, we briefly address the colonial antecedents of the relationship between racial difference and art (González Reference González2003).

If we look at visual arts, colonial artists were a rather heterogeneous group that included a small elite – who tended to be whiter – and a mass of artisans who did more routine work and tended to have more Indigenous and Black ancestry (Solano D. and Flórez Bolívar Reference Solano D. and Flórez Bolívar2012). Both types of artists worked mostly for the Church – creating paintings, carvings, sculptures – although some also did work (mostly portraits) for private clients. The artistic professions were regulated by guilds, and although Black, Indigenous and mestizo artists were members of artists’ guilds and confraternities (Rivas Pérez Reference Rivas Pérez2021), the status and prestige of these organisations were associated with the socio-racial quality of their members. Therefore, in the Spanish colonies there were certain tendencies towards ‘whitening’ in that artists with obvious Black and Indigenous ancestry might try to downplay or hide their socio-racial origins (Deans-Smith Reference Deans-Smith, Katzew and Deans-Smith2009). However, some mestizo artists were part of the elite, such as the Mexican painter Juan Patricio Morlete Ruiz – famous for his casta pictures, depicting diverse racially mixed types (castas) in the colony – who was a member of the Academia de San Carlos in New Spain. In New Granada (now Colombia), the well-known painter Salvador Rizo Blanco, a key member of the Expedición Botánica (1783–1816) and right-hand man of its director José Celestino Mutis, was of African descent (‘pardo’ or brown) and was in charge of purchasing enslaved people for the expedition.Footnote ³

After independence, the emphasis of elites in Colombia, as in other Latin American nations, was on establishing a national identity that could not only claim a degree of individuality and distinction – and political sovereignty – on the regional and global stage, but also demonstrate that it was moving towards the modernity associated with the world’s leading powers in Western Europe and North America. This created a certain contradiction in racial terms: ‘modernity’ as defined in the Eurocentric perspective of the time was associated with whiteness; whereas the nation’s distinctiveness arguably lay in its racially heterogeneous population, largely composed of Black, Indigenous and mestizo peoples who were defined as inferior by Eurocentric ideas steeped in scientific racism (Appelbaum, Macpherson and Rosemblatt Reference Appelbaum, Macpherson and Rosemblatt2003; Gotkowitz Reference Gotkowitz2011; Leal and Langebaek Reference Leal and Langebaek2010; Pérez Vejo and Yankelevich Reference Pérez Vejo and Yankelevich2017; Stepan Reference Stepan1982).

Part of this contradiction can be seen if we explore the visual art of the period: for example, the illustrations produced for the Comisión Corográfica, a scientific expedition that, in the 1850s, set out to take stock of the human and natural resources of the young nation of New Granada under the leadership of the Italian-born geographer Agustín Codazzi. Between 1850 and 1853, the Commission’s three artists produced more than 170 illustrations, of which two-thirds were done by the Colombian artist Manuel María Paz.Footnote ⁴

The images they produced were varied but were generally in the style that scholars have labelled costumbrista, romantic and sometimes dramatic, which was in keeping with the travel literature of the time (Acevedo Latorre, Saffray and André Reference Acevedo Latorre, Saffray and Francois André1968; Muñoz Arbelaez Reference Muñoz Arbelaez2010; Saffray Reference Saffray1948; Wiener et al. Reference Wiener, Crévaux and Charnay1884).Footnote ⁵ The majority of illustrations in the travel literature were crafted by artists who had never been to the country and who worked on travellers’ notes. But some travellers – among them the Spaniard José María Gutiérrez de Alba (Reference Gutiérrez de Alba2012) and the German Alexander Von Humboldt (Reference Humboldt1810) – and many Colombian artists, including the Commission’s artists, worked in the field and this informed their costumbrista emphasis on local life, generating many opportunities to represent racial diversity.Footnote ⁶ This was done in various ways.

For example, Ramón Torres Méndez (1809–1885) was a prolific painter who also taught the key Commission artist Manuel María Paz. He is usually classified as costumbrista, due to his focus on the working-class poor, both rural and urban, mainly in Bogotá. But his images are notable for the light colour of his subjects’ skin and their often European-looking features. Only rarely does he show Black people: for example, Champán en el Río Magdalena (Raft on the River Magdalena, 1860) shows the bogas (boatmen) as clearly Black.Footnote ⁷ Although his painting of Indios pescadores del Funza (‘Indian’ Fishermen of Funza) is the only one of sixty-three pictures to use explicitly racialised terminology in its title, his Mujer campesina de Gachetá en viaje (Peasant Woman from Gachetá on a Journey, 1860) shows a woman with markedly Indigenous features, while in his Jinetes de la ciudad y del campo (City and Country Horse Riders, 1860), the racialised dimensions of class difference are clearly visible.Footnote ⁸

In contrast, among the 480 images created by José María Gutiérrez de Alba (1822–1897), some thirty-five use the word indio in the title and five the word negro. Many more show regional scenes that include Black people, such as Lavanderas de Nóvita, Chocó, Cauca (Washerwomen of Nóvita, Chocó, Cauca, 1875) – actually copied from Vista de una calle de Nóvita (View of a Street in Nóvita, 1853) by Manuel María Paz, the Comisión Corográfica artist (see Figure 1.1). The same pattern applies to the 151 images from the Comisión Corográfica that have been archived: thirty-three images show Indigenous, Black and mestizo people, of which eight have titles with the word ‘mestizo’; twenty-two have the word indio; four have a word that explicitly refers to Blackness (negro, mulato, zambo, africano); and five are local scenes prominently featuring Black people, for example, Vista de una calle de Quibdó (View of a Street in Quibdó, 1853) and La marimba, instrumento popular: Provincia de Barbacoas (The Marimba, Popular Instrument: Province of Barbacoas, 1853).

Figure 1.1 Lavanderas de Nóvita, Chocó, Cauca (Washerwomen of Nóvita, Chocó, Cauca), painting by José María Gutiérrez de Alba, 1875.

(Colección de Archivos Especiales, Biblioteca Virtual de la Red de Bibliotecas del Banco de la República)

Three things stand out in these images. First, Indigeneity is a much more prevalent theme than Blackness, doubtless because at that time Indigenous people outnumbered Black people (Smith Reference Smith1966), but also because Black people were seen as less important in the nation (Wade Reference Wade2010b). Second, both Indigenous and Black people are generally portrayed as poor and barefoot, usually in rural settings, an image that was strongly reinforced by the Commission’s texts, which established a clear socio-racial hierarchy associating whiteness with civilisation and non-whiteness with backwardness and primitiveness. Third, the images reflect the strong link between race and region that the Comisión Corográfica created, for example by depicting Black people as located mostly in the Pacific region (Appelbaum Reference Appelbaum2016; Restrepo Reference Restrepo1999). Overall, while Blackness and Indigeneity are by no means always invisible in these images, they are portrayed in stock and limited ways and there is no sense of a challenge to racial hierarchies.

Turning briefly to literature, we can see parallel trends. The paternalist way Black people were portrayed in Jorge Isaac’s romantic novel María (1867), set in pre-abolition New Granada, is often seen as costumbrista. Although slavery as an institution is decried in the novel, as it was in many Latin American nineteenth-century anti-slavery novels (Jackson Reference Jackson1975), enslaved people are portrayed as contented, well treated and passive. (This kind of romantic costumbrismo is an enduring feature: it appears as late as 1929 in Tomás Carrasquilla’s La marquesa de Yolombó, set in colonial New Granada.)

Quite different from the mainstream work of white writers was the poetry of the Afro-Colombian Candelario Obeso (1849–1884), which presented the worldview of the racialised subaltern classes of Colombia’s Caribbean coastal region, where Obeso was born and raised. In 1866, Obeso moved from his birthplace, Mompox, to study in Bogotá, where he joined the local literary circles; he also took up various jobs back in his native region, and in Panama and France. Although it had little impact at the time, the work that later became his best known, Cantos populares de mi tierra (Popular Songs from My Land, 1977 [Reference Obeso1877]), established the beginnings of a Black poetic tradition in Colombia, predating the better-known poetry associated with Hispanic-Caribbean poets such as Nicolás Guillen (Prescott Reference Prescott1985). George Palacios (Reference Palacios Palacios2010) argues that Obeso founded a ‘minor literature’, in which he challenged the dominant forms of Spanish language, attempting to convey the characteristic accent and modes of speech of the Black and mestizo inhabitants of his native region, as well as their everyday experiences. His poetry contested the social exclusion that they and he faced in Colombia, where the dominant imaginary represented Bogotá as ‘the Athens of South America’, which safeguarded ‘the purity of the language’, the ‘correctness’ of diction and the ‘enlightened vocation’ of its rulers, poets and orators (Jáuregui Reference Jáuregui1999: 574), and which depicted Obeso’s home turf as a backward territory (Múnera Reference Múnera1998). Obeso’s poetic mission claimed a legitimate space in the nation for Black people, thus subverting and reformulating the national project in ways that prefigure anti-racism.

Mid Twentieth-Century Colombia: Nation and Racial Diversity

The 1930s and 1940s were marked by political projects of national integration and modernisation – based on expanding education and extending the reach of the state into the rural and urban working classes – and a corresponding artistic nationalism (Bushnell Reference Bushnell1993; Muñoz-Rojas Reference Muñoz-Rojas2022; Universidad Nacional de Colombia 1984; Uribe Celis Reference Uribe Celis1992). Underlying these political projects was the ideology of mestizaje (racial and cultural mixture), according to which Black and Indigenous peoples would gradually disappear into a mestizo majority. However, in this period, intellectual and cultural processes made visible what the ideology of mestizaje had hidden until then: the Indigenous and, especially, the Black presence in Colombian dance, literature, music and popular culture (reified as ‘folklore’ by scholars). There emerged a new socio-cultural consciousness marked by what is known as indigenismo, negrismo and Négritude, and various artistic-cultural expressions played an important role in redefining the meanings of what it meant to be Latin American, Black and Afro-Colombian, and in beginning to challenge racism.Footnote ⁹

This period of national integration was expressed partly in artistic indigenismo, although never at the levels seen in Mexico and Peru. This artistic trend was driven almost entirely by white and mestizo intellectuals and artists, among whom challenging racism was not a priority. At this time, there was little Indigenous counterpart to the emergence of a cohort of Black intellectuals that, as we will describe, helped drive a parallel current of Négritude/negrismo, elements of which were alive to racial injustice.

Continuing with our focus on the visual arts, an example of indigenismo was the group Los Bachué, formed in 1930 by a group of left-leaning white and mestizo artists and writers (Troyan Reference Troyan2008).Footnote ¹⁰ The name alluded to the movement’s aspiration to represent Indigenous people and referred to a Chibcha goddess who had been depicted in a 1925 sculpture by Rómulo Rozo (1899–1964), a Colombian artist who became a Mexican national (Troyan Reference Troyan2008). A founding figure of the group was Luis Alberto Acuña Tapias (1904–1993), who produced paintings of ancient and mythical Indigenous figures, thus locating Indigeneity as Other and belonging to the past. Contributing to this sense of Otherness was the fact that Acuña sometimes depicted Indigenous people naked – for example, in his Bachué (1937) and Chibchakun, el que sostiene la tierra sobre sus hombros (Chibchakun, He Who Holds the Earth on His Shoulders, 1937).Footnote ¹¹ Influenced by Mexican muralists, the Bachué group sought an inclusive national identity based on Latin American, not European, realities, while their leftist ideals of social justice underpinned support for Indigenous and working-class struggles. The search for authentic roots for the nation embraced not only Indigenous peoples but also peasant and mestizo populations – as imagined by the artists – for example, the sculptures Anciana campesina con pañolón (rasgos indígenas) (Old Peasant Woman with Headscarf [Indigenous Features], undated) and Muchacha campesina (Peasant Girl, 1950), both by Josefina Albarracín. While indigenismo was a predominant influence for the Bachué artists, there were a few representations of Black subjects: for example, the sculptor Hena Rodríguez produced Cabeza de negra (Black Woman’s Head, 1945).

Cultural indigenismo was an influence on Pedro Nel Gómez (1899–1994), a visual artist renowned for his huge murals inspired by Mexican muralism and socialist thought (Gómez Reference Gómez2013). For example, in his vast mural La república (1937, 8 × 11 metres), adorning an entire wall of the Council Chamber in Medellín’s city hall, now the Museo de Antioquia, motherhood is represented by an Indigenous woman carrying her child (see Figure 1.2). The influence of the Mexican muralists on Gómez was evident in his attention to poverty, exploitation and displacement, with some attention to mining and its domination by foreign capital. But there is little direct attention to racial difference. The workers, miners and peasants he portrays in La república are phenotypically not very different, in a racialised sense, from the managers and professionals in the painting; the main difference is that the former categories are often shown semi-clothed or naked (like some of Acuña’s Indigenous figures), while the latter wear suits.

Figure 1.2 La república, mural by Pedro Nel Gómez, 1937

Figure 1.2 long description.

(© Fundación Casa Museo Pedro Nel Gómez, by permission).

Figure 1.2Long description

The mural contains many overlapping scenes and people, including independence hero Simón Bolívar, ex-presidents López Pumarejo with a map of Colombia in his hands, Enrique Olaya Herrera, Pedro Nel Ospina, Marco Fidel Suárez, and Carlos E. Restrepo. Also shown are groups of peasant farmers, a group of artisanal miners by a river, and groups of protesters carrying banners with slogans such as “2,500 layers of mining subsoil no longer belong to the republic”. In one corner are John Bull and Uncle Sam, representing forces of foreign exploitation. In another corner, there is a scene from the 1928 massacre by the army of workers of banana plantations owned by the US company United Fruit in northern Colombia. In the foreground are many men in suits talking in groups, including one group around a table strewn with documents. In the background is an Indigenous woman holding a baby. The workers, miners, and peasants are shown semi-clothed or naked, while the managers and politicians wear suits.

The same cannot be said of the work of another muralist, Ignacio Gómez Jaramillo (1910–1970), who, like Pedro Nel Gómez, was influenced by Mexican muralism and socialism. Commissioned to paint murals to decorate the National Capitol building in Bogotá, he created La liberación de los esclavos (The Freeing of the Slaves, 1938) and La insurrección de los comuneros (The Rebellion of the Commoners, 1938), both referring to themes of social justice and featuring brown and Indigenous figures; La liberación also features many Black people, mostly semi-naked (Solano Roa Reference Solano Roa2013). Conservative elements in Colombia were highly critical of the murals of both Gómez Jaramillo and Nel Gómez for their depiction of nudity and for their supposed lack of artistic value, but also for their socialist tendencies. It is not clear to what extent the murals’ reference to the racialised character of social injustice was an element in the conservative reaction. But murals by Gómez Jaramillo were plastered over in 1948 and some of those by Nel Gómez covered with curtains in 1950, to be uncovered only in the late 1950s when the political context was more liberal.

If racial injustice was not a theme in indigenismo and was of uncertain status in these murals, it got more of an airing by the Black artists of this period – mainly writers, dancers and musicians. However, this airing was an ambivalent part of a Colombian version of the Spanish Caribbean literary negrismo, which emerged at this time, the product of two processes. The first was the growing number of Black intellectuals from the Caribbean and Pacific coastal regions and the Cauca Valley, many of whom migrated to the big cities for education. The second trend was the often paternalistic acceptance by white and mestizo intellectuals of elements of Black artistic expression, which were treated in a romanticised manner that aligned with negrismo and international trends in artistic primitivism (Price Reference Price2001). Much of this was reflected in the national popularity of musical styles associated with the Caribbean coastal region, such as cumbia and porro, which, despite being subject to some cultural whitening as they became commercialised, did not entirely lose the Black symbolism that was, in fact, central to their popular appeal (Wade Reference Wade2000).

Some of the romantic and objectifying tendencies associated with negrismo were also evident in visual art, where primitivist perspectives were also prominent. Mulata cartagenera (Mulatta from Cartagena, 1940) by the painter Enrique Grau (1920–2004, born in Panama) is a realistic depiction of a sexualised Black woman, although it is not typical of his work.Footnote ¹² The painting’s realism and subject matter made an impact and it received a mention at the Primer Salón Nacional de Artistas Colombianos (First National Colombian Artists’ Salon) in 1940, an achievement for a Caribbean painter realistically depicting a Black woman. The painting raised the profile of Blackness as a vibrant element in the nation. However, in terms of combating racism, it can be argued that this type of painting reproduced stereotypically sexualised images of Black women.

In the realm of literature, some Black writers from both coastal regions eschewed the paternalism and primitivism associated with negrismo. Writers from the Pacific coast region included Arnoldo Palacios (1924–2015), born and raised in the province of Chocó, who moved to France in 1949 and lived there until his death. In the novel Las estrellas son negras (The Stars are Black, 2010 [Reference Palacios1949]), set in Quibdó, the provincial capital of Chocó, he described the psychological damage caused by racism and, unusually for the time, established a direct correlation between US and Colombian forms of racism (Pisano Reference Pisano2012: 95). The novel and its powerful social critique were largely ignored in Colombia until the Ministry of Culture published a third edition in 1998. Something similar happened with Carlos Arturo Truque (1927–1970), also from Chocó, who, in short stories written in the 1950s, used a social realist style to present the lived realities of the racialised subaltern classes of his region (Truque Reference Truque1993). Truque was also mostly ignored until the 1990s. In the 1950s, too, the Chocoano poet Hugo Salazar Valdés (1922–1997) was appointed director of the magazine of the Teatro Colón, deputy director of the National Library and head of the cultural outreach programme of the Ministry of Education. Laurence Prescott (Reference Prescott and Ortiz2007: 145) states that Salazar’s poems are a testimony to ‘the struggle of the Blacks of the Pacific for a dignified life within Colombian society’.

Writers from the Caribbean coastal region had a greater impact; in the 1960s this was amplified by the enormous influence of Gabriel García Márquez, whose writings made famous a magical realist image of the region, even if this muted its racial Blackness (Bryan Reference Bryan1988). Blackness was more evident in the poetry of Jorge Artel (1909–1994), who was born in Cartagena and continued to be based in the region until his death, apart from travels in the Americas between 1949 and 1971; in 1940 he published Tambores en la noche (Drums in the Night). However, Jacques Gilard (Reference Gilard1986: 41) characterised his poetry as displaying a ‘very conventional negrismo’: by making frequent references to music and dance, he evoked a sensual rhythmicity for his native region (Prescott Reference Prescott2000).

Rather different were the siblings Manuel, Delia and Juan Zapata Olivella (1920–2004, 1926–2001 and 1927–2008, respectively), also of Caribbean coastal origin, who devoted themselves to literature, music, dance, visual arts, activism and party politics for many decades – all supported by cultural and historical research. Manuel and Delia Zapata Olivella radically contested the prevailing version of mestizaje as a process of whitening the nation, seeing it instead as a force for real, but as yet unrealised, democracy (Jackson Reference Jackson1988; Viveros Vigoya Reference Viveros Vigoya, de Benavides, Castro-Gómez and Vásquez2013). They affirmed the value of Black and Indigenous cultures and drew attention to racism in the country. Manuel conducted research on Afro-Colombian culture and mestizaje and brought musicians from his native region to Bogotá, but he channelled his efforts mainly through his literary work, which achieved national and international fame. An early example was Chambacú, corral de negros (Chambacú, Corral of Blacks, 1967 [Reference Zapata Olivella1963]), which challenged Cartagena’s racist order by giving a socially realist depiction of life from the perspective of Black people in a marginalised neighbourhood in the city (Ortiz Reference Ortiz2007).

Meanwhile, Delia published articles in magazines and journals such as Páginas de Cultura, Colombia Ilustrada, Revista Colombiana de Folclore and Revista de Etnomusicología; she also researched and taught traditional artistic expressions of the Caribbean and Pacific regions at the Instituto Popular de Cultura in Cali (Valderrama Reference Valderrama2013), while her dance company, Danzas Folklóricas Colombianas, toured nationally and internationally. Delia’s research in what was known as folklore – a category rooted in European traditions in which urban elites studied subaltern rural people (Muñoz-Rojas Reference Muñoz-Rojas2022) – went beyond ‘the reification, collection, preservation and classification of traditions and cultural practices of Afro-Colombian peoples’, traits characteristic of a costumbrista, positivist and romantic vision of folklore research (Valderrama Reference Valderrama2013: 271): she sought to make visible the relationship of her work with her African roots and with racial inequalities (Valderrama Reference Valderrama2013: 267), even if, at the time, acknowledging African ancestry meant risking a loss of prestige (Prescott Reference Prescott1996: 111).

Art practice, research and anti-racist activism went together in the work of Delia and Manuel. With other Black students living in Bogotá, they participated in the organisation of the Día del Negro (Black People’s Day) on 20 June 1943, in solidarity with protests against the lynching of Black trade unionists in Chicago, but also highlighting the lack of freedom and equality of the Black Colombian population. On this occasion, poems by Obeso and Artel were recited and cumbia was danced. Manuel was a founding member of the Club Negro (1943) and the Centro de Estudios Afrocolombianos (1947) which, despite being ephemeral, had a great influence on the discussions and debates taking place at the time, linking them to the questions being asked by Black peers in other regions about race, identity and imperialism. At the same time, these organisations were strategic spaces for affirming the place of Afro-Colombian values and cultural manifestations in the national imaginary and for challenging the racism of Colombian society and its image as a potentially inclusive mestizo nation (Pisano Reference Pisano2012; Wade Reference Wade2016). These Afro-Colombian intellectuals pointed out that the yardstick by which ‘racial prejudice’ and ‘discrimination’ were being assessed at the time was misleadingly determined by a comparison with race relations in the segregationist United States; and they deployed notions of equality and democracy that had in fact been advocated by Afro-Colombians since the early days of the republic (Lasso Reference Lasso2007).

The work of constructing Black identity was evident in other research that sought to revalue Afro-Colombian lifeways and led to the emergence of an Afro-Colombian counter-public in which questions of racism and Black/Afro identity were discussed (Valderrama Reference Valderrama2018). Folklorists and artists from the Pacific region, such as Mercedes Montaño (1912–1999), Margarita Hurtado (1918–1992) and Teófilo Potes (1917–1975), as well as Lorenzo Miranda (1935– ) from Palenque de San Basilio in Colombia’s Caribbean region, shared with Delia and Manuel Zapata an interest in researching and promoting Afro-Colombian music, dance and oral traditions, and in using their work to denounce racism in Colombia (Arboleda Quiñónez Reference Arboleda Quiñónez2011; Valderrama Reference Valderrama2018). This work ran alongside the more academic efforts of Black anthropologists such as Rogerio Velásquez (1908–1965) from Chocó and Aquiles Escalante (1923–2002) from Barranquilla, who began to turn Black communities into a topic of interest for anthropology. Other artists and cultural promoters from the Pacific region, such as the poet Benildo Castillo, the dancer and singer Alicia Camacho Garcés and the musician Petronio Álvarez, made other forms of knowledge visible, channelling them into various artistic genres.

These artists and researchers contributed to the strengthening of Black cultural identity in Colombia. Long before the formal recognition of Afro-Colombians as an ethnic group in the 1991 constitutional reform, their various contributions articulated their understanding of ‘folklore’ as part of a political struggle to resignify the cultural representation of racialised subaltern groups. Afro-descendant music and dance (recognised as also bearing Indigenous influences) – long seen from a dominant perspective as an object of shame and evidence of racial inferiority and moral inadequacy – was finally being positively recognised as valid cultural expressions, and this was an important achievement for the Afro-descendant community, redefining their existence beyond their physical characterisation.

To summarise thus far: we have shown that artistic reference to racial difference took various forms. In the hands of state agents, it could be allied to projects of cartography and governance; in the hands of white and mixed-race intellectuals, it could have elements of primitivism and paternalism, but could also be aligned with a socialist emphasis on social equality, in which dark-skinned and Indigenous people figured as oppressed workers, without racism itself being identified as a problem; in the hands of Black artists and writers, it could be harnessed to critiques of social injustice in which racism was understood as an integral element.

The Politicisation of Black Artistic Practice

In the second half of the twentieth century, the Afro-Colombian diaspora continued to weave networks and build common spaces around culture, generally in central Andean cities and mainly in Bogotá. From the 1960s onwards, political organisations emerged in communities of Black migrants to the Andean cities, focusing on questions about the ‘racial condition’ of Black people and ‘their participation in the construction of the country’ (Arboleda Quiñónez Reference Arboleda Quiñónez2011: 162). In 1975, the Primer Encuentro Nacional de la Población Negra Colombiana (First National Meeting of the Colombian Black Population), held in Cali on 21–23 February, brought together 183 delegates from across the country to discuss the political and social problems of people of African descent (Wabgou et al. Reference Wabgou, Rodríguez, Cassiani and Ospina2012: 99). This led to initiatives to promote affirmative action in education, denounce racism and defend ethnic rights in the political sphere, which continue to be at the centre of Afro-Colombian organisational processes.

Two years later, the organisers of the Primer Congreso de Cultura Negra de las Américas (First Congress of Black Culture of the Americas), which took place in Cali, Colombia, in 1977, described the conference as undertaking ‘a double task in the battle against neo-colonialism: education and politicisation at the same time’ (Valero Reference Valero2020: 48). They sought to promote strategies for awareness-raising and change for Colombian Black communities through cultural practices. While some panels in the Congress discussed the need to decolonise art and aesthetics in order to produce their own cultural forms, others pointed to the lack of Black intellectual and cultural reference points as a manifestation of racism. During this congress and the subsequent ones in Panama (1980) and São Paulo (1983), Black culture emerged as ‘fuel for Négritude as ideology’ (Arboleda Quiñónez Reference Arboleda Quiñónez2011: 192): that is, as having an eminently political character and being a contested field for the definition of Black identity (Valero Reference Valero2020).

For Santiago Arboleda Quiñónez (Reference Arboleda Quiñónez2011), Carlos Valderrama (Reference Valderrama2013, Reference Valderrama2018) and Francisco Flórez Bolívar (Reference Flórez Bolívar2015), the cultural consolidation of this period is what made possible the first organised political expressions of Black culture and identity. This occurred in conversation with events in the United States, where, between 1968 and 1975, African American activists were putting into global circulation concepts such as ‘Black power’ and ‘Black is beautiful’, promoting racial pride and the creation of cultural and political institutions around the cultural expressions of Black communities (Arboleda Quiñónez Reference Arboleda Quiñónez2011: 158; Laó Montes Reference Laó-Montes, Rosero-Labbé, Laó-Montes and Rodríguez2010: 294). This had a great impact on Afro-Colombian youth, who appropriated these concepts to legitimise their positions as political subjects. Referring to an Afro-Colombian cultural renaissance, Arboleda Quiñónez (Reference Arboleda Quiñónez2011: 206) mentions the example of the ‘cultural front of southern Valle [province] and northern Cauca [province]’ which, in the late 1970s and the 1980s, held meetings that not only consolidated their relations but also led to the questioning of Eurocentric aesthetic canons that devalued Black cultural and artistic expressions.

During this period, thinkers, artists and cultural promoters came together around local festivals, such as those in Palenque de San Basilio and Tumaco, to showcase Black and Afro-Colombian culture, still considered exotic by mainstream audiences. In 1987, the first Festival of Currulao (a Pacific-region music genre) was held in Tumaco – it still exists today, despite economic limitations – bringing together music, theatre, dance and oral literature, as well as cultural promoters interested in Afro-Colombian artistic production. In the same year, the Green Moon Festival was born on San Andrés Island under the slogan ‘a fraternal embrace in the form of race and culture’, showcasing the music, cinema, gastronomy and religious and sporting expressions of San Andrés communities and of the Creole culture of the English-speaking Caribbean. A year later, in 1988, the first Encuentro de Literatura Oral del Pacífico Colombiano (Meeting on Oral Literature of the Colombian Pacific) took place in Buenaventura, organised by the poet and writer Alfredo Vanín Romero under the slogan ‘So that the people do not lose their memory’. Approaches like these express the emerging awareness of the importance of oral tradition – and, ironically, the need to register it in literary form (see, for example, Vanín and Pedrosa Reference Vanín and Pedrosa1994) – as a counter-hegemonic version of official history, or as ‘history that does not grow old’, in the words of Manuel Zapata Olivella (Reference Zapata Olivella1983). This perspective allowed the bringing together of ‘scattered pieces of Afrodiasporic thought, which allowed people to collate and contrast versions, maintaining their diversity, but above all to elaborate new meanings of the past, the present and the future, based on these other sources of history’ (Arboleda Quiñónez Reference Arboleda Quiñónez2011: 207).

The reform of the Constitution in 1991 brought with it the recognition of a ‘multicultural and pluriethnic’ identity for the country and of Black communities as an ethno-cultural group (Political Constitution of Colombia, 1991, Art. 7). In this new context, legislation was also created that addresses culture and ethno-cultural diversity as elements for the achievement of peace: Law 70 of 1993, based on collective ownership of land, a fundamental principle of Black culture in the Colombian Pacific region; a 1993 law establishing a Ministry of Culture to manage state cultural policies; and the General Law of Culture of 1997, which specifies the uses of cultural expressions in cultural policy, including to mitigate violence.

These reforms led to a new inclusion of Afro-Colombian culture, and particularly music, in some spaces of the cultural market. An example is the growing presence in popular music of elements from the Pacific region and the proliferation of groups that have taken up the music of that region, which for a long time, unlike Caribbean music, had been rejected as being linked to primitive atavism and the incapacity to progress (Wade Reference Wade2000). In recent years, this music has featured in state cultural programmes and policies and is present in events such as the Petronio Álvarez Festival of Pacific Music, which has been held in Cali since 1997, and the Green Moon Festival, which was revived in 2012. At the same time, some musicians have fused the musical legacy of the Pacific, the traditional genres of the Caribbean and the native music of San Andrés with elements of contemporary urban music, creating sonorities that are both global and rooted in local traditions.

The new multicultural policies have sought to mobilise traditional music, including Afro-Pacific music, to combat violence in the country, although ironically ‘the emergence of multiculturalism was closely linked to the intensification of violence in the country’ (Birenbaum Quintero Reference Birenbaum Quintero2006: 14). However, the display of Afro-Pacific music on state stages in order to ‘make our essential affinities prevail over our passing differences’ – in the words of President Samper (Birenbaum Quintero Reference Birenbaum Quintero2006: 15) – has demanded its spectacularisation. Consequently, local aesthetic logics have been eclipsed, separating musical practices from their ritual functions, and conditioning their recognition to a certain domestication of their differences in order to affirm what Samper called ‘shared characteristics’ over and above the ruptures implied by the relations of enslavement and exploitation to which Black populations of this region were subjected.

Another example of this new Afro cultural presence on the national scene is the surprising national recognition in the new millennium of champeta, a musical genre from Colombia’s Caribbean region, previously stigmatised with racist stereotypes and seen as breaking conventions of propriety (Cunin Reference Cunin2003). Indeed, in 2001, Sony released a CD with a telling title: La champeta se tomó a Colombia (Champeta Has Taken Over Colombia).

Afro music, in all its diversity, because of its association with ‘escape’ or cimarronería in the face of Western hegemonic values, has gradually become a resource for political mobilisation that brings together various social causes.Footnote ¹³ Ángel Quintero (Reference Quintero2020) argues that the freedom and spontaneity of Afro rhythms and dance, as well as their dialogical and heterogeneous character, can be dissociated from stereotypical imaginaries and used to foment a new type of anti-individualist sociality. We could say that these musical practices deconstruct sense conventions, deploying sentipensamiento (feeling-thinking) in an integrated way that is far removed from Eurocentric aesthetic norms that tend to separate feeling from reason. This gives them an anti-racist potential insofar as they allow an embodied and integrated apprehension of the effects of racism and create a sense of community through sharing these music and dance expressions. However, it is worth remembering that this potential can best be developed in relative freedom from the hegemonic discourses of multiculturalism and the neoliberal logic of cultural policies that instrumentalise these musical practices as ‘technologies of peace’ and make citizens responsible for reducing violence (Ochoa Reference Ochoa Gautier2003).

Turning to the visual arts, in contrast to what happened in literature, music and dance, it was not until after 1950 that the first representations of Afro-descendants by Afro-descendant artists were produced, marking a transition from being objects to subjects of representation. One of the first Afro-descendant artists to follow this path was the painter Heriberto Cogollo, who was born in Cartagena in 1945 and has lived mostly in France since 1966. He was one of the members of the renowned Grupo de Los 15, a group of artists at the School of Fine Arts in Cartagena which, between the 1950s and 1960s, proposed disruptive artistic initiatives in the local art scene.Footnote ¹⁴ Cogollo, who is no stranger to ‘revealing his own identity’ and his African roots, inspired by his contact with Europe and North America (Obando Hernández Reference Obando Hernández2018: 104), began in the 1970s to do research on aspects of the body and spirituality that masterfully express the difference between looking at the complexity of the African physical and spiritual body from the outside and from the inside.Footnote ¹⁵ Despite being a renowned artist with an extensive international career, he was until recently largely unknown in Colombia.

In the new millennium, we find references to the Black presence in the Colombian visual arts in various publications: Nuestros pintores en París (Our Painters In Paris) (Mendoza, Gómez Pulido and Jordán Reference Mendoza, Pulido and Jordán1989), with a chapter devoted to Heriberto Cogollo; El arte del Caribe colombiano (Medina Reference Medina2000); the essay ‘La imagen del negro en las colecciones de las instituciones oficiales’ (The Image of the Black Person in Official Institutional Collections) by Beatriz González (Reference González2003); and the curatorship of the exhibition Viaje sin mapa: Representaciones afro en el arte contemporáneo colombiano (Journey without Maps: Afro Representations in Contemporary Colombian Art) by Raúl Cristancho and Mercedes Angola (Reference Cristancho Alvarez and Angola2006). This exhibition was ‘A first approach to the visualisation and positioning of contemporary plastic [arts] production in Colombia’ (Cristancho and Angola Reference Cristancho Alvarez and Angola2006: 2) and it marked an important milestone in the history of Afro-Colombian art by breaking the silence about Afro-descendant artists and by highlighting how the mainstream politics of representation in modern art have been shaped by the cultural hierarchies of the Colombian socio-racial order. The curators brought together a generation of artists who were beginning to work with a clear awareness of being subjects of their own representation – among them Liliana Angulo Cortés, Fabio Melecio Palacios Prado and Lorena Zúñiga.Footnote ¹⁶ Liliana Angulo Cortés has explored photography, installation and sculpture, and has worked with archives that reveal the power relations structuring visual representations, territorial control, constructions of masculinities, and the way power is inscribed in the bodies of Black women. Using exaggeration, parody and exoticising stereotypes, she has denounced the violence to which Afro-descendants are subjected (see Figure 1.3). She has also curated various exhibitions that reflect on the collective and personal meanings of Blackness in Colombia, and on the history of hopes, desires and resistances related to processes of racialisation (Viveros Vigoya Reference Viveros Vigoya2021).

Figure 1.3 One of nine images from the series Negro utópico by Liliana Angulo Cortés, 2001

(© Liliana Angulo Cortés, by permission).

In 2013, the exhibition ¡Mandinga sea! África en Antioquia (Goddammit! Africa in Antioquia) (Maya Restrepo and Cristancho Reference Maya, Adriana and Cristancho2015) continued this exploration of the presence of Afro-descendants in Colombian art, their role and the ways they have been represented and have represented themselves.Footnote ¹⁷ This exhibition included artists such as Heriberto Cogollo, Fabio Melecio Palacios and Liliana Angulo Cortés. Younger artists also featured, such as Fabio Arboleda, a painter, musician and rapper who draws on the language of graffiti to portray Afro-descendant urban subcultures; Lloreida Ibargüen who, in her work Trabajo de negro (Black People’s Work), translates mining work to the present day, showing the bodies of construction workers – of which her father was one – for whom ‘urban tunnels are substitutes for the old mining tunnels’; and Servando Palacios, who uses self-portraiture and elements of clothing fashion from Afro-Colombian popular culture to explore, embody and question different facets of Black identity (Maya Restrepo and Cristancho Reference Maya, Adriana and Cristancho2015).

Likewise, after thirty years of state multiculturalism, changes are beginning to occur for the first time in the audiovisual sector in relation to the Afro-descendant population as a subject for a new generation of women and men who work individually and collectively, contributing to the current dynamism of Afro-descendant artistic practices. Some of the collective processes have been developed by Afro-Colombian organisations. Thus, the Corporación Afrocolombiana de Desarrollo Social y Cultural (Afro-Colombian Corporation for Social and Cultural Development, CARABANTÚ), with the support of the Centro Popular Afrodescendiente (Afro-descendent People’s Centre, CEPAFRO), in 2014 developed the Kunta Kinte Ethno-Educational Afro Film and Video Showcase, which in 2016 became the International Kunta Kinte Afro Community Film Festival. Its objective was to create an ethno-educational film forum to critically analyse the situation of human rights, racism and territoriality of Afro-descendant communities, and the implications for community life in Medellín. The showcase also sought to promote reflection on and recovery and strengthening of Afro-Colombians’ historical-ancestral roots in all their diversity.

To date, nine editions of Muestra Afro (Afro Showcase), exhibiting Afro-Colombian audiovisual art and film, have taken place, most recently in November 2024.Footnote ¹⁸ The 2021 version, organised by Bogotá’s Cinemateca and the collective Wi Da Monikongo (the Afro-Descendant Audiovisual Council of Colombia, created in 2017 and present since 2018 in the Muestra Afro showcases), emphasised the spaces for participation and training that dialogue around Afro-diasporic audiovisual, cinematographic and artistic expressions, in particular Afro-feminist and Afro-futurist filmmaking.Footnote ¹⁹ These showcases made visible and strengthened the participation of people working in the Afro audiovisual sector in Colombia and articulated this with global Afro-diasporic production.

Through varied tactics and aesthetic techniques, the artistic-cultural processes described in this section have radicalised the constrained form of self-recognition offered by multiculturalism and have renewed the arts scene with projects that seek to combat racism. For Black people, self-representation has meant opposing the imposition of an official history that has ignored or stereotyped their performances and cultural productions; creating, recreating and resignifying Colombian Black history and culture in all its polyphony, based on their own experiences and with their own aesthetic resources; struggling to acquire social agency and political and cultural representativeness within Colombian society; in other words, using their collective creative power to denounce, to criticise and to think of alternative ways of ordering the world. These kinds of projects have blurred the increasingly indiscernible frontiers between activism and art, generating a kind of transterritoriality, in which the creative power of activist practices and the politics of artistic practices with their micropolitical resistance have been mobilised, disrupting the dominant meanings and the sensory organisation of the Colombian socio-racial order.

Artistic Practices and Anti-Racist Strategies

In this section, focusing on the Colombian artists with whom we collaborated in the CARLA project, we analyse how the dominant political climate in Colombia since about 2005 has made the articulation between art and activism more evident and given greater visibility to anti-racist art practice. During this period, a far-right political tendency, promoted by the political forces of Uribism, implemented a form of governance based on maximising ‘security’ and encouraging foreign capital, which was oriented towards extractivism, corporatism and the privatisation of public goods.Footnote ²⁰ This reaffirmed mechanisms of political and legal control, while also introducing new forms of criminality and violence perpetrated by state actors and their proxies at levels from the regional to the highest spheres of government.

As a consequence, social conditions, in terms of human rights protection and the satisfaction of basic needs, became notoriously precarious in the country. The governance involved new technologies of violence and forms of necropolitics (Mbembe Reference Mbembe2003) that multiplied the actors involved in the conflict and resulted in the violent displacement of small-scale agriculturalists from their lands and, to a disproportionate extent, of Afro-descendant and Indigenous populations from their territories, contributing to a deterioration of their living and working conditions in both rural and urban areas (Palacios Valencia and Mondragón Reference Palacios Valencia and Mondragón2021; Vergara-Figueroa Reference Vergara-Figueroa2017).

From the 1990s, artistic practices in Colombia had already been undergoing incipient changes in their forms of circulation and expression, their spaces of creation, their social commitment and their strategies for engaging audiences. For example, there was a shift from the private sphere and a search for individual aesthetics to what María Margarita Malagón-Kurka (Reference Malagón-Kurka2010) terms ‘indexical art’, which engaged overtly with themes of politics, trauma and violence, and involved artistic processes that were more collective, participatory and community-based. Abstraction gave way to everyday references, accessible to wider audiences. The works of Fabio Melecio Palacios and Liliana Angulo Cortés, mentioned earlier, are outstanding examples of how the violent and racialised social order began to be questioned critically on the basis of everyday experience. Overall, the period from 2005 to the early 2020s was notable for its prolific collective artistic projects committed to social transformation, not only of Afro representation in art, but also of the value attached to the artistic practices of Afro and other non-white populations in Colombia.

In this context, which moved from a critical framing of the representation of Blackness to a much broader questioning of racism and the legacies of colonialism in Colombian society, artists from various disciplines, self-identifying mostly as Afro-descendants but some also as mestizos, converged on a series of projects and collaborations characterised by their anti-racist orientation and strong commitment to social justice. Their unifying premise is that artistic practice plays a crucial role in dismantling manifestations of racism in racialised social orders. Furthermore, these artists pose questions to audiences about Afro otherness in Colombia, no longer only from the location of the rural Black community but also from urban contexts.

One example of this collaboration around anti-racist artistic work is Colectivo Aguaturbia, consisting of Afro-descendant artists and cultural agents. In 2016, this collective organised an encounter of artistic practices under the title IRA (Imaginación Radical Afro), which brought together visual arts, animation, audiovisual production and performances in the city of Bogotá. The Aguaturbia collective expanded the initiative proposed by the Viaje sin mapa exhibition (see previous section) in that it not only sought to bring together issues of Afro representation in art and culture in Colombia, but also proposed ideas for organised anti-racist actions, drawing on Afro artistic networks, which aimed to transform art spaces for Black people in urban contexts.Footnote ²¹ Artists such as Wilson Borja, Loreta Meneses, Laura Asprilla, Paola Lucumí, Liliana Angulo Cortés, Leonardo Rua and Natalia Mosquera, among others, affirmed the strategy of ‘imagining’ other ways of being for Afro people in spaces, such as Bogotá, where the white–mestizo social configuration consigned Afro people symbolically to the place of eternal outsider.

The anti-racist artistic practices we will discuss here include Black poetry, Black popular music, performance and ‘living arts’, contemporary Afro dance, illustration, photography, visual arts, audiovisual production and works based on archival activism and genealogical research.Footnote ²² Although their aesthetic languages and artistic disciplines are diverse, the anti-racist strategies employed by them can be analysed in terms of three overlapping and intertwined pathways: subversion, irruption and engaging with publics to produce emotional and affective reactions.Footnote ²³

In relation to the first strategy of subversion, Benjamin Barber (Reference Barber2011: 110) observes that some analyses of art conceive of it as ‘oppositional, subversive to power, to the conventional order and its paradigms’. Although we understand that art can also be aligned to regimes of power, the character of the artistic practices among the artists that we review here is subversive, as it is intentionally focused on constructing aesthetics that destabilise stereotypes about Afro people and question the racial order in relation to narratives of national identity, constructions of beauty, the criminalisation of social protest, and the racialised effects of the armed conflict. These works employ subversion around representations of the Afro body by highlighting the physical and symbolic violence that results in its erasure from history, its violent elimination and its exoticisation and sexualisation. Often a vital spur to wanting to be subversive is feeling inconforme, literally being dissatisfied, but more widely experiencing a sense of ‘non-conformity’ and being at odds with prevailing trends, which acts as a creative input. As Frantz Fanon (Reference Fanon1986) famously observed, in a racist society Black people frequently experience their bodies as a location for this sense of being at odds: the affective traction produced by an artistic focus on the body is thus especially powerful. Working through and on the Black body and the strictures to which it is subject can produce strong resonances in audiences who may also have experienced their bodies as sites of (racialised) dislocation.

An example of this is offered by the choreographer Rafael Palacios, who founded the Afro-contemporary dance company Sankofa Danzafro in 1997:Footnote ²⁴

More recently, Sankofa Danzafro has been increasingly oriented in an explicitly anti-racist direction, blurring the frontiers between corporeal and intellectual research, training and choreographic creation (see Chapter 4). The company has elaborated a dance narrative and a sensory experience that surprises, disrupts, affects and sometimes shocks in order to destabilise a single, crystallised narrative of Blackness and challenge complacent images of ‘beautiful and erotic dancing Black bodies’. As Palacios says, in Sankofa’s work the bodies occupy the stage not only to be seen, but also to be heard – in ways that question the racist scaffolding of the society in which they live.

Margarita Ariza Aguilar, who works with visual arts, performance and live arts, expresses a similar inconformity with regard to how the racial order pervades the family sphere. This results in an everyday racism that, while not producing effects as violent as the murder and displacement of Black (and Indigenous) people, generates the intimate violence of internalised racism (Hordge-Freeman Reference Hordge-Freeman2015; Moreno Figueroa Reference Moreno Figueroa2010; Pyke Reference Pyke2010). Ariza’s 2010 project Blanco porcelana (Porcelain White) challenged the everyday norms of beauty, expressed within the family, that valued the whitest phenotypes, encouraged the use of cosmetics that promised el tono perfecto (the perfect tone) and instilled values such as prudencia (prudence) in young women (see Figure 1.4).Footnote ²⁵

Figure 1.4 Drawing from Blanco porcelana by Margarita Ariza Aguilar, 2010

Figure 1.4 long description.

(© Margarita Ariza Aguilar, by permission).

Figure 1.4Long description

The face has little detail, but the eyes and heavy eyebrows stand out. Although stylised curls are part of the elaborate coiffure surrounding the face, other surreal elements include the Venus de Milo and other such females from the classical period, intended to represent Western standards of female beauty. The artist has intervened in these images in various ways. Next to these is a small photo of the face of the artist as a young child. Also represented are seashells, commonly used in skin-lightening products, and hair combs. At the bottom are the words “Tono Perfecto”, meaning perfect shade, a phrase used to advertiser cosmetics, and “Prudencia”, meaning prudence, referring to the modesty that the artist sees as instilled in young women by society.

Yeison Riascos, an artist from Buenaventura who works with photography and drawing, also makes reference to inconformity, this time in relation to the articulation between the everyday spheres of Afro identities, the racialised order and its relation to much more deadly racialised violence. His photographic work Descendimientos (Descents, 2014) concerns twelve young Black men from Buenaventura on the Pacific coast who were massacred with impunity by paramilitaries in 2012 and were given little public recognition (see Figure 1.5).Footnote ²⁶ Riascos says:

Figure 1.5 Photo from the series Descendimientos by Yeison Riascos, 2014

(© Yeison Riascos, by permission).

The artistic practices of Rafael Palacios, Margarita Ariza Aguilar and Yeison Riascos constitute a subversive anti-racism because they challenge different facets of the racial formation that make them feel inconforme. Palacios develops a narrative language in dance that combats stereotypes using an Afro-centred aesthetic and recovers the knowledge embodied in the dances of Afro communities in Colombia. He critically reviews the daily expressions of racism faced by young Afro-Colombians in Medellín, in the realm of dance and the wider society. His works La ciudad de los otros (The City of the Others, 2010), La mentira complaciente (The Complacent Lie, 2017) and Detrás del sur: Danzas para Manuel (Behind the South: Dances for Manuel, 2021) create intersections between anti-racism, the affirmation of identity and Afro-referentiality through narratives that push audiences to question racialised stereotypes of Black dancing bodies, while the physical and sensory experience of the performance aesthetics lends an affective intensity to this questioning. In the same way, Yeison Riascos with his works Descendimientos and Rostros divinos (Divine Faces, 2012) seeks to decentre colonial representations of Judeo-Christian religiosity, materialising such representations in Afro bodies in order to weaken the Western imaginary of religiosity and whiteness and to make visible the marginalisation of Afro communities in ecclesiastical contexts. And finally, Margarita Ariza, with her project Blanco porcelana, interrogates more subtle and insidious manifestations of racism involved in the representation of whiteness in family contexts, while her later project Black Enough? (2016) explores subtle racism in the way presidential leaders have been represented in Colombia.Footnote ²⁸ The common intention is to question audiences about their own racialisation in conditions of privilege or disadvantage.

The second pathway – that of irruption – may also be spurred by feeling inconforme, but it takes a specific form. The works of the Afro-Colombian poet Pedro Blas Julio Romero and the Afro-feminist poet Ashanti Dinah Orozco, from Cartagena and Barranquilla respectively, are committed to speaking from a place of enunciation informed by Afro epistemologies, challenging the field of poetic production where Afro referents are seen as ‘second-order’. Their anti-racist approach consists of breaking – irrupting – into a literary narrative that omits non-Western references to the motifs of world literature and that creates a profound individualisation of creativity and an exhausting anguish for individual participants disenchanted with their time. The irruption of these Afro poetics creates a pathway towards a ‘contemporary critical debate on the analysis of a textuality unprecedented in terms of its artistic and political significance, which represents a new place of transnational enunciation’ (Maglia, Rocha Vivas and Duchesne Winter Reference Maglia, Vivas and Winter2015: 1). Both writers use poetic language and allusive imagery to circumvent literal-minded rational readings and engage readers on a subliminal plane, generating emotive responses with affective intensity sharpened by the irruptive quality of their imagery. Affect can be traced by attending to the intensity and the rhythm of the poetic discourse (Knudsen and Stage Reference Knudsen and Stage2015) that generates images rooted in the Afro-religious world. Pedro Blas enriches his poetic universe with images such as ‘el diablo piel de abdomen de salamanquesa’ (devil with gecko-belly skin) and ‘Muchacha de las aguas, Gimaní’ (water-girl of Gimaní), which recreate different aspects of the working-class Black neighbourhood of Getsemaní in Cartagena (see Figure 1.6).Footnote ²⁹ The combination of Afro-religious references and allusions to the history and present of the neighbourhood allow him to raise a voice against cultural appropriation, gentrification and the chiaroscuro of heritage policies, and the continuing presence of coloniality in local spaces and their racial conformations.

Figure 1.6 Muchacha de las aguas, Gimaní: digital image created by Hanna Ramírez, 2021, to accompany the eponymous poem by Pedro Blas Julio Romero

Figure 1.6 long description.

(© Hanna Ramírez, by permission).

Figure 1.6Long description

The woman’s left arm hangs down between her legs. Her right arm rests on a side-table, the top of which is supported by an African sculpture of a kneeling naked female. A small parrot sits atop a Benin-style sculpted woman’s head on the floor by her feet, alongside a large snake and assorted seashells. In the background are two plants in pots adorned with African-style designs, while the walls also have African-style decorations. The whole scene is cut across by a slanting beam of sunlight entering from a window at the back.

Similarly, Ashanti Dinah constructs a strong poetic universe framed by references to Yoruba and Afro-Cuban religiosities.Footnote ³⁰ Questions of meaning, the place of existence and communion with the cosmos – archetypal tropes in world literature – are addressed through highlighting intimate relationships with ancestors and the dead, communion with nature and its role as a messenger of the ancestors, and an everyday rituality expressing an ecological philosophy that fuses time and space into a continuum and blurs the boundaries between the human and the non-human.

These strategies of irruption can also be found in works of ‘artivism’ (artistic activism). Examples include the works of graphic artist Wilson Borja such as Color piel (Skin Colour, 2008), Terato (Monster, 2012), Muestra afro (Afro Showcase, 2018), Reparaciones (Reparations, 2022) and his illustrations for the poems of Ashanti Dinah (2022), all of which challenge the regime of visuality and representation of the Afro in the field of animation and illustration.Footnote ³¹ Irruption also characterises what might be called ‘art-chivism’, understood as the critical revision of archives from an artistic standpoint to highlight racial injustice, social exclusion and the marginalisation of minoritised groups. Works undertaken by Liliana Angulo Cortés in this vein include the 2015–2016 project Un caso de reparación: Un proyecto de revisión histórica y humanidades digitales (A Case of Reparation: A Project of Revisionist History and Digital Humanities), which explored the relationship of enslavement and Afro-descendants with the colonial-era Botanical Expedition;Footnote ³² and the 2022 project Rodrigo Barrientos: disfrazado de hombre blanco (Rodrigo Barrientos: Disguised as a White Man), which uncovered the previously ignored fact that Barrientos was a Black painter.Footnote ³³ These projects were part of Angulo’s Ethno-Education Laboratory, which she established during a guest curatorship at the Museo de Antioquía (Chacón Bernal Reference Chacón Bernal2021). Both Borja and Angulo seek to influence and question the field of education and diverse spaces such as museums, university art education, ethno-education and the production and use of images.

Paralleling the tactics of irruption used by Sankofa Danzafro, the female champeta group Las Emperadoras, from Cartagena, intervenes in the field of Black popular music to affirm the presence of women in champeta music, which had been dominated by Afro-descendant working-class men. Las Emperadoras broaden the field of anti-racist activism by intertwining it with a critique of sexism and the under-representation of women. Las Emperadoras subvert the image of women as passive participants in music, showing not only their capacity for agency as composers, singers, and samplers, but also presenting performances far removed from the hyper-sexualised stereotypes of Black women that are widely purveyed, including by some Afro artists.Footnote ³⁴

This last example indicates that strategies of subversion and irruption are often juxtaposed and intertwined in artistic practice: not all subversion involves irruption, but irruption often has subversive effects. This is also evident in the case of Sankofa Danzafro, where the difference between subversion and irruption is often blurred. The intent is to subvert taken-for-granted racialised orders, but this is achieved by the irruption of the dance performances onto the stage and into the audiences’ sensory apparatus.

Turning now to the third pathway of engaging with publics, the critical interpellation of the public in different forms (as audiences and as communities) is a political intention that characterises all these artists. The Afro-Colombian Cultural Corporation for Social and Cultural Development, CARABANTÚ, mentioned in the previous section, is a good example of the use of art, in this case film, as a tool for engaging Afro communities in the process of emancipation and ethno-education. Recently, with the support of the Wi Da Monikongo collective (also mentioned earlier), they have worked with children and young people to produce a series of short films, screened during the International Kunta Kinte Afro Community Film Festival 2021. The films were made by Afro children and adolescents in Medellín and told stories about their neighbourhoods, with a focus on highlighting the leadership shown by Afro community members.Footnote ³⁵

This kind of artistic practice has contributed to broadening the forms of audience participation, turning members of the public into co-producers of collective narratives that document, accompany and express social discontent. In particular, the social protests that took place in 2017 (a civic strike in May and June in the city of Buenaventura), in 2019 (a national strike on 21 November) and in 2021 (widespread protests in May and June) were scenarios in which the politicisation of artistic practices became a common platform for the spontaneous and passionate expression of a new emerging political subject in Colombia: the young people that made up La Primera Línea.Footnote ³⁶

Examples of the active role that artistic practices played in the 2021 protests include the collective graffiti in the main avenues of cities such as Medellín and Cartagena, street theatre in Barranquilla, and batucadas (street dances with drums) and sit-ins with street concerts in Tumaco, Pasto, Bogotá, Medellín and Cali. In addition, the protests included artistic interventions such as the collective creation of the multi-coloured ten-metre Monumento a la Resistencia in Cali and the painting of graffiti and images onto the huge 1960s national monument, Los Héroes, in Bogotá.

Artists and collectives such as Margarita Ariza, Sankofa Danzafro, Las Emperadoras de la Champeta, Yeison Riascos, Liliana Angulo and CARABANTÚ, among others, engage in artistic practices that can be defined as social, community, participatory, public and contextual art, whose main aim is to pursue, ‘above and beyond aesthetic achievements, the benefits of social change and the participation of communities in the realisation of the work’ (Palacios Garrido Reference Palacios Garrido2009: 199). These works establish artistic practices that question conventions in art about the individualistic nature of creativity and relocate creative acts in their social context, with community participation and with aims of social transformation.

These creators include in their artistic practices the question of the impact of race on the lives of Afro-Colombian people, highlighting how racialisation works in the systematic reproduction of exclusions in the country. The way artistic work has been linked to these social mobilisations in Colombia reflects the erosion of the boundaries between art and social activism. There is a displacement of the conventional terrain of modern art, shifting attention towards the social context, involving audiences, and including the participation of communities that have their own aesthetic and political sensibilities about creative acts. This is a form of participatory expression that decentres assumptions and debates about authorship in art, subsuming them into the political intentionality of community-oriented social transformation (Nardone Reference Nardone2010).

This transformation of artistic practice in Colombia has made it possible to rethink the ways in which racism and the relations between race and artistic practice are addressed in the country. Instead of tracing references to Afroness and Blackness in art, concerns are focused on how these themes are enunciated outside the institutional and formal channels of artistic expression, generating durable discursive and political presences that express identities in cultural and artistic forms that affirm the value of difference.

In relation to the pathway of engaging the public, these artists seek to affect people by challenging assumptions about the raciality of Afro people. These strategies of questioning audiences can generate distinct affective-emotional responses that can unsettle an unprepared viewer. For example, in relation to the reception of Sankofa’s work, in the context of a focus group, one viewer mentioned:Footnote ³⁷

Reactions of discomfort can be generated among audiences by anti-racist artistic practice, as well as emotions of empowerment and empathy:

Anti-racism in Colombian art practice is present today in a range of aesthetic forms – music, illustration, literature, dance and performance – that situate the question of racism in the context of other material aspects of systematic exclusion. In their practice, artists shift towards a commitment to collective pedagogy for social transformation, employing aesthetic codes that are taken from everyday contexts and re-signified through reflections on inequality, racism and rights in society. Artistic practice not only interrogates, but also represents a collective feeling of transcendence of the exclusions experienced by racialised subjects in Colombian society.

Conclusion

This chapter started with a broad look at the representation of racialised difference in Colombia until the end of the nineteenth century, showing how Black and Indigenous subjects were represented as backward and lacking ‘civilisation’. The participation of racialised subaltern artists in artistic production during this period was limited and has been subject to historiographical erasure (which recent critical interventions into the archives are seeking to correct – for example, by highlighting the African ancestry of Botanical Expedition member Salvador Rizo Blanco). The work of the poet Candelario Obeso, who did participate in the literary world and has been recognised, shows that, while prevailing trends of costumbrismo certainly influenced his work, with its focus on local characters and customs, there was also a powerful strand of what we might today label as anti-racism in his assertion of the value of Black lifeways. We next showed how in the first half of the twentieth century, tendencies labelled by scholars as indigenismo and negrismo had the ambivalent effects of highlighting the Indigenous and Black presences in the nation while simultaneously limiting them with romantic and primitivist perspectives. However, Black artists and intellectuals – more numerous than Indigenous ones at that time – often managed to escape the confines of conventional negrismo and promote a racially-aware social justice agenda: Manuel and Delia Zapata Olivella are key examples.

In line with the work of CARLA in Colombia, we then moved the focus to Black artists, tracing the increasing politicisation of their postures from the 1950s and the more explicit attention to racism that came with the influence of international currents, such as Négritude and Black Power, and the continuing increase in numbers of university-educated Black people. The multiculturalist reforms of the 1990s opened some space for debates about racism, but funding and support for ‘cultural diversity’ ultimately diverted attention away from anti-racism. The role of music, already significant in earlier decades, has continued to be important and it reveals the value of a less direct approach to racism that works by affirming Black presence, autonomy and agency.

Our account in the final section of the chapter on the work of the Colombian artists who collaborated with CARLA reinforces the value of a heterogeneous anti-racism: explicit challenges to racist stereotypes and racist aesthetics go alongside forceful assertions of Black agency and autonomy; critical attention to the way Blackness is represented in art goes alongside initiatives to create spaces for Black autonomy within institutional contexts, such as museums and archives, and projects that involve collective participation, including by people who do not identify themselves as artists: the work of Liliana Angulo Cortés in museums and archives is a good example. Anti-racism has become a more explicit frame for these kinds of artistic practice, but what counts as ‘anti-racist’ may be judged in flexible and inclusive ways.

As Guarani curator Sandra Benites eloquently put it, ‘there are folks who think that Indigenous peoples do not suffer racism. How so? Racism in Brazil started against the Indigenous peoples, it started with all this exclusion, with this erasure. It started with them saying that the Indigenous peoples were not human. What is that [if not racism]? What other word would one use to describe it?’ (Benites Reference Benites2021).Footnote ¹ Indeed, although historians have long recognised that racism in the Americas is a product of European colonisation, with Amerindians being its first victims, the last decades’ prolific scholarship on racism in Brazil hardly mentions Indigenous peoples. By the same token, the main thrust of anti-racist policy in Brazil has been directed at Afro-descendants, while racism against the Indigenous population is rarely named as such and is marginal to the political agenda, despite the importance of ‘the Indian’ in the national imaginary.

Tuxá anthropologist Felipe Cruz has argued that although racism against Indigenous peoples in Brazil is not different from racism against Afro-descendants (in other words, it usually includes physical and/or verbal abuse, dehumanisation, refusal to offer services, etc.), the way in which racialisation happens is different. Racialisation of Indigenous peoples, according to Cruz, often involves de-authorisation, that is, the denial of someone’s Indigenous identity (Cruz Reference Cruz, Oliva, Chaves, Filice and Nascimento2019: 159). De-authorisation can happen in any context in which Indigenous peoples or individuals are perceived by non-Indigenous as differing from preconceived ideas of Indigeneity: this includes, for example, Indigenous persons making use of modern gadgets, adopting aspects of a Western lifestyle, speaking Portuguese or simply defending their own rights. In other words, the mere fact that Indigenous peoples are in contact with the non-Indigenous (notwithstanding the fact that such contact, to begin with, was often not voluntary) makes them, in the eyes of certain non-Indigenous Brazilians, ‘not Indigenous enough’. According to that logic, then, the only way of being ‘Indigenous enough’ would be to revert to a time prior to contact with non-Indigenous people.

As a result of de-authorisation, Indigenous persons become invisible as Indigenous subjects and racism against them is also rendered invisible. This happens in spite of the fact that de-authorisation is often accompanied by other processes of racialisation that are frequently experienced by other non-white groups: Indigenous peoples are also called dirty, savages and infantile, their cultures and knowledge are dismissed or considered inferior and their spirituality is deemed as superstition. More often than not, racism against Indigenous peoples is based on this paradox: those who refuse to ‘modernise’ are labelled as ‘savages’ or backward and are therefore pressurised to change or ‘modernise’, while those who do adopt certain non-Indigenous life styles are deemed ‘not Indigenous enough’ by the same sectors of society that would see them as ‘savages’ had they not adopted those changes (Sá and Milanez Pereira Reference Sá, Milanez Pereira, Brandellero, Pardue and Wink2020: 169). In the words of Cruz, ‘if this racialisation attempts effectively to proclaim the ephemeral existence of the Indigenous condition, it is successful in the sense that it renders invisible not only the Indigenous persons themselves, but it also manages to operate without being noticed, that is, by rendering the racial dimension of Indigenous peoples also invisible’ (Cruz Reference Cruz, Oliva, Chaves, Filice and Nascimento2019: 160).

De-authorisation has probably become more common since the last decades of the twentieth century, as a backlash to the strengthening of the Indigenous movement after the 1988 Constitution, which made Indigenous peoples more visible as the main defenders of their own rights and interests. But the process in itself is not new. The arrival of Europeans in the territory now called Brazil started a process in which, according to European colonisers, the Indigenous peoples were destined to disappear, to stop being Indigenous. In the ‘Carta a el-rei Dom Manuel’ (Letter to King Manuel), the first document ever written by a European about Brazilian natives, the knight Pêro Vaz de Caminha, acting as scribe for Pedro Álvares Cabral, reputed to be the European ‘discoverer’ of Brazil, explains to Manuel I of Portugal that the natives encountered by the Portuguese had no religion of their own and would most likely be willing to become Christians and subjects of the kingdom. They were, according to Caminha, a blank slate ready to be written on by the process of colonisation. In the years that followed that first landing, the original population of millions of natives was decimated by diseases, extermination and enslavement. The survivors were expected to abandon their ways of living, in a process that was seen as inevitable, as Indigenous peoples were deemed as ‘savage’ and not compatible with ‘civilisation’.

Representations of Indigenous People in the Arts

Representations of Indigenous peoples in literature and visual arts differed little from this view. The eighteenth-century poem O Uraguai (1769), by Basílio da Gama, criticises the Jesuits for their oppression of the Guarani in the south of Brazil. But the poem’s Indigenous heroes, Cacambo, Sepé and Lindóia, all die at the end, with the Guarani survivors being promised civilisation by General Gomes Freire de Andrade, a real-life official in the Marquis of Pombal’s anti-Jesuit government and the true hero of the poem. A few decades later, José de Alencar’s Romantic foundational novels O Guarani (1857) and Iracema (1865) would further popularise the idea of sacrificial Indigenous heroes. O Guarani’s protagonist, Peri, sees his beloved – a white woman, Ceci – as a quasi-supernatural being beyond his reach and ends up risking his life in order to save her from destructive floods. If the end of this novel is ambiguous (with the white woman in his arms, Peri perches in a palm tree that is then carried away by the flood waters), the ending of Iracema is less so, as the eponymous Indigenous heroine dies of sadness after being abandoned by her inconstant Portuguese lover, Martin, but not before giving birth to Moacir, whose name, ‘son of suffering’, is meant to represent all Brazilians. Alencar celebrated the Tupi and Guarani by relegating them to the past, to the role of ancestor cultures whose inevitable destiny had been to convert to Christianity and become ‘civilised’ as part of the new nation.

Some of the best-known Brazilian paintings from the Romantic era also depict Indigenous sacrificial heroes. One example is Victor Meirelles’s Moema (1866), which depicts the death of the heroine from Santa Rita Durão’s epic poem Caramuru (1781). In Meirelles’s painting, the corpse of a rather light-skinned Moema is in the foreground, lying on a beach illuminated by pale yellow sunlight, which presumably refers to the dawn of Indigenous cultures (see Figure 2.1). In a very similar style, Lindóia (1882), by José Maria de Medeiros, portrays one of the most famous scenes from O Uraguay: the death of the heroine. As in Meirelles’s Moema, a fair Lindóia occupies the foreground, having just committed suicide using a poisonous snake.

Figure 2.1 Moema, painting by Victor Meirelles, 1866

(courtesy of Museu de Arte de São Paulo).

Throughout most of the twentieth century, public policies and academic studies continued to foretell the demise of Indigenous peoples, who were expected to disappear as a result of both violence and assimilation. Even sympathetic scholars, such as anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro, proclaimed the imminent disappearance of Indigenous peoples, caused by capitalist expansion into their territories and the loss of their ability to carry out traditional cultural practices (Ribeiro Reference Ribeiro1970). The arts, for the most part, continued to echo this view. The avant-garde novel Macunaíma (1928), by Mário de Andrade, is a good example. The novel is in many respects a revolutionary inversion of the colonialist model, as its protagonist, ‘the hero without character’ Macunaíma, leaves his native Amazonia to travel to São Paulo and teach the paulistas new ways of being (Sá Reference Sá2004). However, like most literary Indigenous heroes created by non-Indigenous writers, Macunaíma dies at the end and his people are said to disappear entirely, their language and stories having to be repeated by a parrot. In his first and most successful novel, Maíra (1976), Darcy Ribeiro also presents us with a pessimistic view of the future of Indigenous peoples, as the god of the fictitious Mairum culture decides to capitulate in his battle against the Christian god.

These are just some examples of what is perhaps the most prevalent trope in depictions of Indigenous peoples in the arts. From the beginning of colonisation to the last decades of the twentieth century, the racialisation of Brazilian Indigenous peoples nearly always seemed to include the stigma of imminent disappearance. To be Indigenous is, according to this particular definition, to be always on the brink of extinction.

De-authorisation and Land

At the heart of these processes of de-authorisation is the issue of land. Since colonial times, de-authorisation has been used by state powers and non-Indigenous landowners as a way to deny, explicitly or implicitly, the right to ancestral territory. In his letter, Pêro Vaz de Caminha assured the king of Portugal that the lands they had just found were fertile and ‘everything one plants will grow’. In other words, if the Indigenous peoples were a blank slate that would gladly accept the Christian religion and be subject to the Portuguese crown, then the territory where they lived would be available to the king. As ownership by the Crown slowly gave way to private ownership, with land titles being distributed by the Crown and, later, by the monarchic, republican and local governments of independent Brazil (as well as being extensively falsified by land-grabbers), de-authorisation became ever more prevalent. Recognising someone as Indigenous is to acknowledge that their ancestors were there before the colonisers arrived. It implies, therefore, a recognition of their right to the land where their ancestors lived. Refusing to identify someone as Indigenous, on the other hand, is to deny their right to ancestry and to land. In the words of Cruz: ‘As a reminder that those territories had been occupied before European conquest, these peoples were extremely dispensable and in fact, had to be exterminated, civilised or whitened in order for the colonial enterprise to be successful. In this sense, Indigenous racialisation was grounded on an alleged fragility, since the only fate for this race was disappearance’ (Reference Cruz, Oliva, Chaves, Filice and Nascimento2019: 153).

A very current version of this logic is the resurrection of the racist legal argument called ‘time frame’ (marco temporal). ‘Time frame’ originally emerged as a ‘thesis’ in the Federal Supreme Court during the trial for the demarcation of Raposa Serra do Sol Reservation in Roraima (Amazon) in 2009. At the time, one of the ministers (judges) of the Supreme Court defended limitations to the originally proposed extension of the Indigenous reservation by arguing that Indigenous peoples should only be granted rights to land they occupied at the time of promulgation of the 1988 Constitution, which occurred on 5 October. Since then, landowners and anti-Indigenous lawmakers have repeatedly attempted to turn this ‘thesis’ into actual legislation and, after the election of Jair Bolsonaro, the ‘time frame’ argument gained momentum as the most recent attempt to inscribe de-authorisation into law. It has gathered strong support from the mainstream press and considerable parts of the non-Indigenous population, who are willing to believe the 1964–1984 military dictatorship slogan of ‘too much land for too few Indians’ or simply accuse Indigenous peoples of being ‘fake Indians’.

Not surprisingly, the ‘time-frame’ argument has been the subject of fierce opposition and intense mobilisation on the part of the Indigenous movement. Although Indigenous peoples of Brazil always resisted colonisation through organised rebellions and wars against invaders and land-grabbers, the current pan-Indigenous movement in defence of legal rights and ancestral territories started in the 1970s, initially under the umbrella of the Catholic organisation CIMI, Conselho Indigenista Missionário (Indigenous Missionary Council), which sponsored meetings among regional Indigenous groups to discuss needs and demands. By 1978, several regional Indigenous organisations were coming together against the military dictatorship’s proposal to ‘emancipate’ Indigenous peoples – a cynical suggestion of liberation that in reality would allow the commercialisation and trading of Indigenous lands. In 1980, a group of Indigenous leaders founded UNI, União das Nações Indígenas (Indigenous Nations Union), which would become the most successful pan-Indigenous organisation in Brazil: their skilful negotiating guaranteed the inclusion of fundamental Indigenous rights in the post-dictatorship 1988 Constitution, especially articles 231 and 232, which respectively granted Indigenous peoples the right to keep their traditional practices, beliefs and territories, and to defend their own interests. Indigenous leader Ailton Krenak’s performance in the 1987 constitutional debates, in which he delivered a speech against the violation of Indigenous rights while painting his face in traditional style, has become the most iconic moment of the Constituent Assembly.

The Constituent Assembly was followed by a period of relative stability under a neoliberal democracy that nevertheless sponsored the increasing extraction of natural resources and deforestation. The election of ex-military Bolsonaro as president in 2018 brought back the rhetoric of the 1970s’ dictatorship in favour of a supposed ‘emancipation’ of Indigenous peoples, and violent, undisguised and systematic attacks against Indigenous rights, land-grabbing and invasion of Indigenous territories. On the judicial and political front, these attacks have supported the ‘time frame’ argument, trying to push it into law.

Indigenous mobilisation against the ‘time-frame’ and other forms of violence and racism has happened on the political and juridical fronts (with Indigenous lawyers and lawmakers pressing to overturn attempts to officialise it) and on the streets. The ability to maintain or recover original land and territory has always been at the core of Indigenous activism. For most native peoples in Brazil and the Americas, land rights are often synonymous with the ability to follow traditional practices and beliefs. Most Indigenous peoples see themselves as guardians of forests, rivers and mountains, which they regard as their relatives and ancestors. For these reasons, in the last two decades Indigenous peoples have been at the forefront of environmental activism in Latin America. A common slogan in Indigenous activism in Brazil is that Indigenous peoples belong to the land instead of the land belonging to them. It is not surprising, then, that during the Bolsonaro government there were massive demonstrations when the ‘time frame’ proposition was being voted on in Congress, in addition to the demonstrations and encampments that happen every year (for example, the Free Land Camp that happens every April in Brasília). On the political front, the Indigenous activist Sonia Guajajara ran for vice-president in the 2018 presidential elections with a platform that defended ‘good living’ or bom viver (on the ticket of Guilherme Boulos, the candidate for PSOL – Socialism and Liberty Party). In the same year, a Wapichana woman, Joênia Wapichana, was elected to the national Congress, together with many Indigenous mayors and councillors in local elections. In the 2022 Congressional elections, although Joênia was not re-elected, Sonia Guajajara and Célia Xakriabá were, doubling the Indigenous representation. Immediately after coming into power in 2023, president Lula da Silva appointed Guajajara as head of the newly-created Ministry for Indigenous Peoples and Wapichana as president of FUNAI (National Foundation for Indigenous Affairs), the first-ever Indigenous person to assume that role.

Indigenous Resistance through Literature and Visual Arts

Along with juridical, political and street activism, the arts have emerged (particularly since about 2020) as a new and powerful arm of the Indigenous movement. Several creative fields – literature, visual arts, cinema and music – have joined the legal and juridical battle in defence of Indigenous rights and traditional territories, by exposing to wide audiences the physical and legal attacks made against Indigenous peoples during Brazil’s long history of colonial and colonialist violence. At the same time, the arts are also working in areas that go beyond the reach of the legal and the juridical. Their collective work has been using epistemic tactics that challenge colonialist conventions and knowledge systems. These epistemic changes start with their mere presence in spaces that have traditionally excluded Indigenous cultural production and Indigenous bodies, such as literary festivals, bookshops, museums, art galleries and universities. In what many Indigenous artists have dubbed retomada (reclaiming, occupation), Indigenous writers, filmmakers and visual artists have been main features in festivals and exhibitions in the galleries and museums of the most important cities in Brazil. Their presence in these spaces not only challenges what Sonia Guajajara described as the feeling of being constantly made aware that we ‘are in the wrong place, that we were not meant to be there’ (2019), but also questions established notions of what literature, cinema, music or visual arts are or should be.

Needless to say, all Indigenous groups had their own artistic production before the arrival of the Portuguese: this included narrative and poetry (in oral forms), visual arts (basketry, feather art, body painting, ceramics, architecture), music and dance, and many groups continue these practices today. These art forms are usually collective and play various roles in the communities, being related to activities such as cooking, fishing, hunting, planting, giving birth, providing spiritual protection, rituals, healing, dreaming and so on. Some of these art forms, particularly narrative ones, have long registered the changes brought about by colonialism and protested against those changes. From the end of the nineteenth century, narrative forms also began to be printed and published, though usually under the name of a mediator, often a traveller, a priest or an anthropologist who listed the authors as ‘informants’. It is only since the late 1980s, and more widely from the 2010s, that Indigenous peoples from all over Brazil have started to sign their own works individually or collectively, as well as to make use of Western media and genres to target non-Indigenous audiences. The writer Daniel Munduruku explains that individually signing works of Indigenous literature is a phenomenon that dates back to the rise of the Indigenous movement in the wake of the Constituent Assembly, in the mid 1980s, and that has become more ubiquitous with the entry of young Indigenous women and men into universities, particularly with the creation in 2012 of quotas for Indigenous students in public universities.

The first writer to describe herself publicly as an Indigenous author was Eliane Potiguara, who started to publish poetry in the mid 1980s, at the same time as taking a very active role in the Indigenous movement. Born in Rio de Janeiro from parents who had to abandon their traditional territory in Paraíba, Potiguara has highlighted the fight of those who were obliged to leave their land and hide their culture, particularly women. ‘Brasil, que faço com a minha cara de índia?’ (Brazil, What Do I Do with My Indian Face?), first published in 2004, is one of Potiguara’s best-known poems. It delves into the issue of identity for Indigenous people who are supposed to have lost their culture: ‘Brazil … what do I do with my Indian face / and my spirits / my strength / my Tupã / and my circles? // What do I do with my Indian face / and my toré [ritual] / my sacredness / my cabôcos / and my land?’ (2018).Footnote ²

Along with Potiguara, Daniel Munduruku and Olivio Jekupé are the best-known names in contemporary Indigenous literature from Brazil. Originally from the state of Pará, in the Amazon, Munduruku lives in the countryside of São Paulo and is one of the main organisers of Indigenous literature events in the country, from weekly interviews and podcasts to conferences, festivals and workshops. He is also a prolific writer and his production includes Indigenous versions of Brazilian history that analyse colonisation from the point of view of the colonised (Reference Munduruku2017), as well as traditional tales, usually published in well-illustrated editions that target mostly young readers. Jekupé is a Guarani from the Krukutu village in the outskirts of São Paulo and, like Munduruku, has published an extensive list of books directed at young readers. Both make a point in presenting their works regularly at elementary and secondary schools, as they believe that a function of Indigenous literature is to educate non-Indigenous people about Amerindian cultures.

Since the 2010s, the Brazilian publishing scene has seen the arrival of another type of Indigenous literature: theoretical or philosophical essays that find acceptance among academic readers, particularly those involved in environmental issues. One example is Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert’s The Falling Sky (Reference Kopenawa, Albert, Elliot and Dundy2013), which was originally published in French (2010) and later in Portuguese (2015). Considered one of the most important books recently published in Brazil, it is an attempt (in some sense, not dissimilar to Munduruku’s or Jekupé’s) at teaching non-Indigenous audiences (or whites, as they are called in the book) about Yanomami culture, explicitly as a way to deter Western extractivism in the Amazon forest. Kopenawa and Albert’s book is important because it is the first book-length testimony by an Amazonian shaman and the first ever to offer a thorough analysis of Western extractivism from the point of view of an Indigenous Amazonian native. In addition, The Falling Sky offers key theoretical and philosophical insights into Yanomami ways of seeing the forest and points to conceptual differences between Indigenous Amazonia and Western ways of thinking, particularly with regard to what is normally called ‘nature’ in Western traditions. The Falling Sky has also become an important inspiration for Indigenous artists and activists, as a written Indigenous source that confirms and brings together philosophies and ways of living common to various Indigenous peoples of lowland South America, while being strongly grounded on specific Yanomami beliefs. At the core of these philosophies is the idea that humans are part of affective networks that involve not only their own species, but other living and dead beings, and what Western languages tend to refer to as ‘spirits’ (which is a much more complex concept in Yanomami and Amerindian thought and includes the ‘spirits’ of non-human beings) and even entities that Western science considers ‘inanimate’, such as rivers and mountains.

In a related genre, Ailton Krenak has published a series of very short books based on the oral interventions he has made in the last few years, challenging Western capitalist assumptions about, for example, the importance of work, the meaning of ‘humanity’ or why the idea of ‘the future’ is not found in native Brazilian cultures. Published by the prestigious Companhia das Letras (with some translated into English), these mini-books have reached a wide readership interested in alternatives to the political establishment (Krenak Reference Krenak2020a, Reference Krenak2020b).

The dramatic rise in publication of Indigenous authors in the last five years is challenging assumptions long held in Brazilian society about what it means to be Indigenous. As the academic and popular success of authors such as Kopenawa and Krenak demonstrates, Indigenous literature has the ability to invert the still popular nineteenth-century socio-evolutionist view that Amerindian cultures and points of view are backward, savage, inferior and therefore destined to be ‘improved’ and to ‘progress’ or disappear: these books’ success lies precisely in their radical approach to pressing contemporary issues, such as climate disaster and social inequality – an approach that is seen not as something from the past but, on the contrary, as presenting potential solutions for the future.

Indigenous Visual Arts in the Amazon: Jaider Esbell and Denilson Baniwa

The cultural field that has seen by far the most dramatic changes in production and public recognition is contemporary visual arts, which will be the focus of the remainder of our analysis.Footnote ³ In the last four years, some of the most prestigious art venues in the country have held exhibitions featuring works by artists such as Arissana Pataxó, Daiara Tukano, Denilson Baniwa, Glicéria Tupinambá, Gustavo Caboco, Jaider Esbell and Naine Terena, among many others. Like the writers mentioned earlier, all of these artists participate actively in the movement for Indigenous rights in their communities and at a national level, and their works are often thematically and organically linked to those movements, being also frequently produced for and exhibited at activist events, including events protesting against the ‘time frame’. Some of these artists define themselves as ‘artivists’, as did Jaider Esbell, whose tragic death in 2021 shook both the art world and the Indigenous movement in Brazil. In a television interview on the occasion of the opening of the 2021 exhibition Moquém_Surarî, which he curated, Esbell declared: ‘I am not a visual artist. What I try, maybe, is to do politics, cosmopolitics’.Footnote ⁴ In the fields of philosophy and history of science, the term ‘cosmopolitics’ is usually associated with Isabelle Stengers’ essays compiled, in English, in the books Cosmopolitics I (Reference Stengers2010) and Cosmopolitics II (Reference Stengers2011).Footnote ⁵ It is impossible to know whether Esbell’s use of the term was directly connected with her work, but in any case, Stengers’ use of ‘cosmopolitics’ to refer to an ‘ecology of knowledges’ resonates well with Esbell’s critique of the limitations of Western thought.

Several examples of Esbell’s cosmopolitics can be found in Carta ao velho mundo (Letter to the Old World, 2018–2019), an artwork that consists of physical interventions into a 1972 Brazilian publication titled Galeria Delta da pintura universal (Delta’s Universal Gallery of Painting, a volume that drew on an older Italian multi-volume set called Enciclopedia universale dell’arte), which, in spite of its over-inclusive title, did not feature any Indigenous art. Esbell intervened in the volume by redacting, drawing, painting and writing on every single one of its 477 pages.Footnote ⁶ Many of those interventions denounce violence committed against specific Indigenous leaders by land-grabbers; others mention the poisoning of food from mercury contamination caused by mining in the Amazon rivers and the environmental destruction caused by extractivism and large-scale agriculture. Several pages make reference to colonialism, the enslaving of Indigenous peoples after the arrival of the Portuguese and the persecution of native religions by Christians.

But Esbell’s interventions are not limited to direct denunciation. Many of them put into practice his cosmopolitics by questioning, from his Indigenous Macuxi perspective, various Western cultural assumptions. Several pages of the book, for example, had their written text occluded by drawings of animals. Taking the place of an alphabetical historical narrative that celebrates ‘art history’ in Western terms, these animals stand for another kind of teaching, for an alternative narrative that is not necessarily human-centred and that is based on affective ties between humans and other kinds of beings. His intervention into Andrea del Castagno’s Crucifixion and Saints (c. 1441), for example, includes drawings of birds pecking at the cross (see Figure 2.2). At first sight, the animals appear to create a humorous, potentially disrespectful commentary on one of the gravest, most serious icons of Western culture: Christ’s crucifixion. Although that may of course be the case, the animals also help us to imagine another narrative, not necessarily humorous: as in so many traditional Amazonian stories where animals save humans or proto-humans from danger, the birds could be there to help free Christ from the cross, while adding Amazonian animal protagonism to a biblical story.

Figure 2.2 Intervention into Andrea del Castagno’s Crucifixion and Saints by Jaider Esbell, from his Carta ao Velho Mundo, 2018–2019

(© Galeria Jaider Esbell de Arte Indígena Contemporânea, by permission).

As mentioned, Esbell was never comfortable with being called a ‘visual artist’. He wanted to go beyond ‘mere visuality’ (Esbell Reference Esbell2018b: 37). In his own words, his work was designed to ‘be in the soul of whoever is nearby’ (é projetado para estar na alma de quem esteja próximo, Reference Esbell2018b: 115); in other words, it was designed to affect those around him. This desire to affect entails layers of ‘extrapolated senses and dimensions’, a loss of control and a feeling of ‘being in a non-place, sensing a non-image, not finding time/space, not finding form’ (Reference Esbell2018b: 115). For Esbell, then, his art should affect viewers by freeing them from expected forms and putting them in touch with unexpected, other, non-Western forms of knowledge.

This can be seen in his acrylic painting Feitiço para salvar a Raposa Serra do Sol (A Spell to Save Raposa Serra do Sol Reservation, 2019). Raposa Serra do Sol is an Indigenous territory that took a long time to be demarcated – the process only ended in 2008, after several years of judicial disputes, which included the coining of the ‘time frame’ thesis and a lot of actual violence against Indigenous peoples in their territories. The marks of centuries of oppression caused by agro-industrial exploitation in the region are still there – in the young Indigenous people who never learned their native languages (because their elders were forbidden to); in the land that mostly became pasture due to cattle ranching; and in the illegal gold-mining enterprises that have damaged the environment. If Raposa Serra do Sol needs to be healed by a spell, those are some of the symptoms. The painting portrays the assistants who will help to carry out the spell: that is, the animals. Several animals are represented, connecting the painting to the series of Macuxi (and other Indigenous Amazonian) narratives that involve the ‘father’ or other ancestor of some creature – usually a talking ancestor, from a time before humans existed. Some of these animals have the appearance of a known animal – there are fish, a jaguar, an armadillo, the heads of some birds. Others are not so recognisable and look like molluscs or even bacteria. They all inhabit the same plane – there is no perspective that organises them and leads the viewer to distinguish the foreground from the background. And yet the painting appears to form a whole, in a way that resembles a map, as if the spiritual powers of the lands and waters of the Raposa Serra do Sol were being ‘mapped’, to be called upon when casting the spell.

In this painting and in other works by Esbell, Raposa Serra do Sol is both the Indigenous land and a symbol for anti-racist struggle. The fight for demarcation encountered powerful reactionary resistance in the state of Roraima and in several national organisations (such as the Brazilian armed forces). More than a decade after the demarcation process ended in 2008, it was still common to see stickers on car windows in Roraima’s capital, Boa Vista, with sayings such as ‘Down with the demarcation of Raposa Serra do Sol’ or ‘I support the island-type demarcation’.Footnote ⁷ These were not displayed only by large-scale farmers or by people who would profit directly from the use of the land. It became an ideological struggle with racist tones: much of the regional media would either repeat the classic de-authorising slogan that the Macuxi were fake Indians or reproduce the myth of the ‘Indian who does not work’ as an ‘argument’ against demarcation. Besides the obvious racism, this ‘argument’ presupposes the Lockean notion that ownership of land comes from working it, one of the ideological drives and part of the liberal justification of colonialism. By picturing Raposa Serra do Sol in terms of the animal spirits that inhabit its lands and waters, Esbell opposes this utilitarian view of territory.

In 2020, Esbell exhibited a pair of giant colourful snakes intertwined around the pillars of Santa Tereza bridge in Belo Horizonte as part of the street-art festival CURA. Titled Entidades, a word that for many Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian peoples can mean ‘spirits’ or supernatural beings, the snakes were subsequently on display in Porto Alegre and on the lake outside the São Paulo Biennale pavilion in 2021. Very colourful during the day, and illuminated from within at night, like giant lanterns, the snakes became a popular attraction in the three cities where they were exhibited, with people of all ages travelling especially to their location to be photographed near them. Yet not all reactions were positive, as some people also threatened to destroy the snakes and, particularly during the Belo Horizonte and Porto Alegre exhibitions, their author became the target of vicious abuse on social media, mostly from attackers who described themselves as adherents of evangelical Christianity (a movement that has gained force in Brazil and that has much support in the country’s congress and senate). Such strong reactions are related to the different symbolic meaning attributed to snakes in Christian mythology (which sees them as embodiments of the devil that caused Adam and Eve to be expelled from Paradise) and in Amazonian Indigenous traditions (where they are often associated with the big Amazonian rivers and seen as ancestors and relatives of humans).

The racist attacks against Esbell’s sculptures are a clear example of the epistemological and affective shock that Indigenous art is able to provoke in Brazilian society. Not that these attacks were necessarily extraordinary: evangelical Christians have been known to burn down Indigenous prayer houses and Afro-Brazilian Candomblé venues. In the case of Esbell’s snakes, what is interesting is the agency attributed to the artworks themselves, whose mere existence in a public space was deemed a threat – in other words, the snakes were seen as able to affect a desired moral order. For some evangelical Christians, there is no place for spiritual or epistemological manifestations in public spaces other than their own form of Christianity. Moreover, those who support the censoring of Indigenous spirituality or forms of knowledge in public spaces are also likely to accuse Indigenous peoples of being ‘fake Indians’. The only alternative for Indigenous peoples, according to this logic, is hiding or conversion, becoming ‘non-Indian’. Esbell’s monumental sculptures brought Indigenous cosmogonic beliefs into the public view, affirming their existence in bright colours, forcing them to be seen and commented on on in the media. And forcing racist hatred to become visible.

Like other Indigenous artists, Esbell’s artistic practice went beyond a single medium – besides painting, he also wrote fiction, curated exhibitions, founded an art gallery, hosted radio programmes and podcasts. Moreover, he theorised constantly about contemporary Indigenous art, a concept he was highly invested in, through speeches, interviews and in programmatic texts. The result was a kind of never-ending performance, registered in hundreds of social media posts and videos in the years before his untimely death. He had a sense of mission, of being a representative both of native artists and of his people, the Macuxi. As he once said, ‘representativeness is intrinsic’ (Esbell Reference Esbell2018a) – that is, he could not avoid being a representative, but if he had to be one, then he also had to constantly destabilise the ways in which Indigenous peoples were perceived in Brazilian society. He had to fight de-authorisation with his own ever-performing body and his art. It was as if he was trying to use the potentialities of several media to capture a cosmology that went beyond what could be seen, read or heard, and which could, to use his words, ‘penetrate the soul’ of his viewers. This is the meaning of cosmopolitics in Esbell’s work: if political change is to happen in the Amazon and involve Indigenous peoples, it has to include an understanding of and affective connection with the various cosmogonies that make up the Amazonian world.

Esbell is not the only Indigenous artist to invoke ancestral cosmogonies in their work. In a talk for the University of Zurich immediately following Jaider Esbell’s death, Denilson Baniwa told the traditional story of the three prawns, ancestors of the Baniwa. Set in a time prior to the existence of humans, the story describes how the prawns were originally recovered by the primordial jaguar grandmother from the bottom of the river, inside a finger bone of one of her grandson’s victims, whose remains had been thrown in the water. Fed and well cared for, the three prawns (called ‘those from inside the bone’) went on to transform themselves into several other creatures (e.g. woodpeckers, crickets) and to initiate the transformation of the universe. They turned fruit into the animals we have today and into proto-humans, the ‘people who knew everything’ (Cornelio and Wright Reference Cornelio and Wright1999). Baniwa has depicted the prawns in some of his digital art as luminescent beings, set over what appears to be a satellite image of water, for example in his Camarão – Tapuya (see Figure 2.3). In his talk, he compared the task of the original prawns, which was to repopulate a world that had been emptied by the constant wars caused by the jaguars, with the work of contemporary Indigenous artists, who have to reconstitute a world that has been nearly emptied of Indigenous perspectives:

Figure 2.3 Camarão – Tapuya by Denilson Baniwa, Reference Baniwa2021

(© Denilson Baniwa, by permission).

The comparison is illustrative of the affective connections that characterise contemporary Indigenous art: artists work in constant communication and consultation with each other and with other Indigenous activists and leaders. These processes certainly include a great deal of intellectual exchange, but they also rely strongly on affective ties based on love and respect. Indigenous individuals in Brazil refer to each other as relatives (parentes) and it is precisely this concept of family that can best translate their way of working together. Similarly to families, there is often the need to overlook or negotiate differences, but those differences are seen as less important than their shared history of being on the oppressed side of colonialism, as well as the experience of being and doing things together. Gustavo Caboco recently referred to it as a ‘methodology of going together’ (ir junto), of speaking for, and in consultation with, the collective.

In one of Baniwa’s images, the bright orange prawn has a human inside its body. This image is part of a series of works – some of them digital, others acrylic paintings – that depict individual animals (a peccary, a frog, a beetle, a tortoise, a snake, a vulture, a fish, an alligator) each with a human inside its body. The images invoke the ‘fathers of animals’ already mentioned, who, at the beginning of time, were all human like us. But ancestral time in Amazonian Indigenous cosmogonies does not usually refer to a period that is past and gone, but rather a time that can coexist with the present and that is periodically reinstated through ritual and through the work of the shaman. In most Amazonian cultures, shamans can transform into other animals and in that guise they are able to see the world that those animals see. This is done with the purpose of healing, solving conflict, deciding future actions and, above all, maintaining the equilibrium among all living things.

For Baniwa and Esbell, the work of visual artists is akin to the task of the shaman: Indigenous artists have to transit between different worlds and translate these worlds to one another. Dressed as a jaguar-shaman, Baniwa has made several performances in different parts of Brazil and outside the country. These performances have a healing and didactic purpose aimed at non-Indigenous society: they fight the invisibilisation and de-authorisation of Indigenous peoples by confronting non-Indigenous society with ‘Indians’ in spaces where they are normally not seen. In doing so, they aim to heal the contemporary maladies of non-Indigenous societies, such as pollution, monoculture and climate catastrophe. In 2018, followed by other Indigenous artists and collaborators, Baniwa ‘hacked’ (his word) the thirty-third São Paulo Biennale. In the final edit of the performance, uploaded onto Baniwa’s site, we see him looking at a few exhibits before buying a book at the gallery bookshop titled Breve história da arte (A Brief History of Art). In the next scene, he addresses an audience in front of a large-scale ethnographic portrait of two Selk’nam men from Tierra del Fuego. ‘Brief History of Art’, he says, holding the book, ‘so brief that I cannot see Indians in it. So brief, that it does not include Indigenous art’. Pointing at the photograph, he asks: ‘Is this an Indian? Is that an Indian? Is this how you want Indians to be? Stuck in the past, with no right to the future? They steal our image, they steal our time, they steal our art. Brief history of art. Theft. Theft. Theft. Theft. White art. Theft. Theft. Indians do not belong just to the past.’Footnote ⁸

In another talk in the same year, Baniwa described the jaguar-shaman as a ‘herald of the new times, who makes Indigenous memories become present and active in all places’ (Baniwa Reference Baniwa2018). This link between memory, tradition and contemporary art is central to the works by Esbell and Baniwa. For example, both have reworked drawings from pre-Cabraline petroglyphs, often through the use of recent technology, as in Baniwa’s projections on skyscrapers in the city of São Paulo in an event protesting the election of Bolsonaro to power in 2019. A 2022 solo exhibition of Baniwa at the Goethe Institut in Porto Alegre included a mural in which a traditional Arawak longhouse (maloca) was surrounded by various animals in the style of ancient petroglyphs. Painted in bright colours over a black background, the mural was reminiscent of Esbell’s works (it was most likely a homage to Esbell). The animals surrounding the house in a dark sky looked like constellations, establishing a clear connection between the cosmic order of the universe and the complex designs in the Baniwa maloca. The architecture of the maloca was also similar to the shape of a frog, one of the animals displayed.

By establishing a continuity between pre-European art and contemporary Indigenous art, Baniwa and Esbell offer a response to de-authorisation and to the freezing of Indigenous peoples in an imaginary past. They also reaffirm the uninterrupted presence of Indigenous peoples in the territory now called Brazil, reclaiming Indigenous rights to ancestral lands against ‘theses’ such as the ‘time frame’. Such rights are based on current and prior occupation but also, crucially, on affective ties between living Indigenous peoples and a network that includes all ancestors and their spirits, as well as the spirits of animals, plants, forests, rivers, mountains and so on. In many of his performances, the jaguar-shaman distributes flyers saying that the specific location of the performance is Indigenous land (Terra indígena). During an intervention that happened just a few months before the pandemic outbreak in 2020, on Paulista Avenue located in the most distinguished business zone of São Paulo, Baniwa recited a poem reminding the audience that all that the rich buildings framing the landscape were built on colonial territory over sacred Indigenous land: ‘All colonial territory / Is ancestral land, first of all / When all the scum is scraped off / Plastic, asphalt, metal / Untold stories in History / Oxygen fills the blood / Those who have always been from here know / São Paulo has always been / Indigenous land’.

The Northeastern Coast: The Art of Arissana Pataxó and Glicéria Tupinambá

If the connection between de-authorisation, invisibilisation and land-grabbing permeates the historical and present experience of most Indigenous peoples in Brazil – and in other parts of the Americas as well – working as a particular marker of anti-Indigenous racism, perhaps nowhere in Brazil is this more true than in the northeast region. Centuries of continuous colonial violence forced many Indigenous groups to forget their language and hide their traditions and spiritual beliefs, as described by Potiguara in the poem cited earlier in this chapter. The retomada (retaking or reclaiming) movements that took place after the 1988 Constitution saw many groups in the northeast, among them the Pataxó and Tupinambá, reclaim their ancestral lands while recovering and fostering the use of language, rituals and traditions. Northeastern Indigenous groups suffer constant physical violence and harassment, as well as frequent accusations that they are ‘fake Indians’ who do not legitimately have the right to their land. These groups are well organised and mobilised, and since the 2010s they have seen an impressive surge in artistic interventions.

Arissana Pataxó’s work Indigente, indi(o)gente, indigen(a)-te offers a poignant comment on the implication of the arts (in this case, photography) in processes of historical violence against Indigenous peoples in the Americas (see Figure 2.4). The work consists of a triptych with interventions into nineteenth-century black-and-white portraits of Indigenous persons (two of them in antique frames). In two of the portraits the individuals are sitting down, posing with blankets covering the lower part of their bodies. The middle photograph includes four persons holding typical Indigenous artefacts (bows, arrows, maracas, etc.). The portraits do not differ from other nineteenth-century ethnographic photographs apart from one detail: in her intervention, Pataxó erased the faces and the naked parts of the bodies of the posing subjects. They are blank, or rather blanked-out, portraits. The title of the triptych plays with the apparent – but etymologically ungrounded – connection between the words ‘indigent’ and ‘Indigenous’. In Brazilian Portuguese, the word ‘indigent’ means pauper or destitute, as it does in Latin, but it is also a legal and journalistic term used to describe unidentifiable dead bodies, particularly in the expression enterrado como indigente (buried as someone with no identity and no relatives).

Figure 2.4 Indigente, indi(o)gente, indigen(a)-te by Arissana Pataxó, 2020

Figure 2.4 long description.

(© Arissana Pataxó, by permission).

Figure 2.4Long description

The portraits on the left and right have antique frames and show individuals sitting down, with blankets covering the lower part of their bodies. The middle unframed photograph shows four people, one sitting and three standing, holding typical Indigenous items (bows, arrows, maracas, a stone axe, etc.). The artist has erased the faces and the naked parts of the subjects’ bodies.

The original portraits, taken in Paris by E. Thiesson in 1844, belonged to the Museé de l’Homme’s collection of Botocudo (Krenak) photographs, which are now housed in the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. Little is known about the individuals who posed for the portraits, but it can be assumed that they were among the various Indigenous individuals who were taken to Europe in the nineteenth century to be exhibited and/or studied as exotic humans. The original photographs emphasise the naked upper torso of men and a woman (the exposed breasts sexualise the woman for non-Indigenous viewers) and body piercings and ornaments. Photographs of Indigenous persons were common from the early days of the camera and many studies have discussed the topic at length, with emphasis being placed on the violent coloniality of such practices (Bell Reference Bell2011). For our purposes, it is enough to say that this type of photograph did not usually identify the subjects, beyond minimal information about their ethnic group. In most cases, the Indigenous people photographed were meant to represent ‘the Botocudo’, ‘the Bororo’, and so on (if not the generic ‘Indian’). Pataxó’s intervention equates the lost identity of the photographed subjects to the lack of identity of destitute dead bodies which are buried without a name, without relatives or friends – in other words, cut off from any affective connections. By removing their faces from the portraits, she makes the violence explicit: these are portraits without faces, without markers, without identity. In other words, the photographs of unidentified Indigenous individuals that populate European museums have transformed those individuals into ‘indigents’, unknown corpses, separated from their life history, their family, their community – in the same way that the photographed individuals themselves were separated from their communities when taken to Europe to be exhibited and studied.

By linking the word indigente to indígena, Pataxó also interpellates the racist dehumanisation of Indigenous individuals by Western knowledge practices, a fact that becomes even more explicit with the poetic transformation of the word indigente into indi(o)gente (Indian [is] human). The last part of the title/poem, indigen(a)-te, calls the viewer to ‘indigenise yourself’ – which can be read in different ways: for Indigenous viewers, it can be presumed to be a call to reconnect with one’s Indigenous roots, to become ‘more Indigenous’. For non-Indigenous viewers, it is probably an invitation to learn Indigenous ways of being or to become an ally, to create affective links with the Indigenous world. This last element of the title allows us to extend the reading of Pataxó’s erasure of the faces and undressed parts of the bodies beyond nineteenth-century photographic practices. The blanking out of Indigenous identity in the portraits can then be read as a comment on the forced erasure and invisibilisation of Indigeneity in Brazil’s colonial and recent history through de-authorisation, a process faced by all Indigenous peoples, be it the Krenak of the photographs or the Pataxó: Indigenous peoples have either to hide and/or erase their Indigenous markers or have their Indigenous identities de-authorised, de-recognised, erased by others. The way out of that process is to indigenar-se, to ‘indigenise oneself’, to assume, in other words, one’s ancestral roots.

Ancestral memory plays a crucial role in the work of Glicéria (also known as Célia) Tupinambá, who describes the process of creating her Manto Tupinambá (Tupinambá Mantle) as a ‘cosmo-agony’:

The three images she describes tell the story of the ritual mantles used by the Tupinambá people in sixteenth-century Brazil. Those were sumptuous mantles made of feathers that included a body-length cloak and a headpiece. Only eleven of those mantles are still extant, all of them in European collections, taken by ships to European destinations centuries ago. None remained with the Tupinambá people of Bahia.

According to Glicéria Tupinambá, the sixteenth-century mantles were still alive in the oral culture of her people when they saw the mantle again. The elder Dona Nivalda visited an exhibition in São Paulo, in the year 2000, in which one of the original mantles was displayed, on loan from a Danish museum. Dona Nivalda petitioned for the mantle to be given back to the Tupinambá people and, although the request was denied, this inspired Glicéria to make a new mantle in 2006 as an offering to the encantados, the supernatural or spiritual beings that are part of the cosmology of her people, and to make other versions afterwards. The creative process involved travelling to France to see a mantle in the Musée du Quai Branly collections and studying images of the other mantles, but above all it involved talking to the encantados in dreams and visions. This is what she describes as ‘cosmo-agony’ – a trance-like state of deep, visceral communication with the ancestors and, crucially, with the mantles themselves: ‘I am not the one who weaves the mantle: the mantle weaves itself’. The mantle, she adds, ‘guided her’ in making its return to the Tupinambá in Bahia, where it acquired a life and a purpose for its people (see Figure 2.5).Footnote ¹⁰ The new mantles perform an epistemological repatriation of the cultural artifacts stolen by European colonialism. The old mantles that are preserved in Europe will remain there as a kind of cosmogonical penance for the colonial violence her people suffered:

Figure 2.5 Manto tupinambá by Glicéria Tupinambá, Reference Tupinambá2020, for the project Um Outro Céu

(© Glicéria Tupinambá/Um Outro Céu, by permission).

As we can see, Glicéria’s description of her creative process and of her people’s relationship with the mantle is steeped in an emotive vocabulary (agony, penance, forgiveness) with echoes in Christianity, specifically the story of Christ’s suffering. But similarly to Esbell’s rereading of Christ’s crucifixion, Glicéria’s description actually subverts the narrative of sacrifice and forgiveness: agony refers not to Christ, but to a process of trance that allows her to communicate with the very Tupinambá encantados that centuries of Christian missionary activity tried to expurgate, and with the mantle itself (whose agency and sentiency would not be recognised by conventional Christianity either). Likewise, ‘penance’ is a punishment reserved not for Christ but for the European museums, that is, the heirs of the colonial agents responsible for severing the Tupinambá mantles from their affective connections with their own people.

Conclusion

If racism against Indigenous peoples is characterised by de-authorisation, that is, the denial of Indigenous identity and/or the pronouncement of their imminent disappearance, anti-racist Indigenous art and literature, as the examples in this chapter demonstrate, is a reaffirmation of Indigenous existence in the present and in connection with ancestral territory. This involves not only denouncing violence, land invasions and legal attempts to curtail Indigenous rights, but also what Jaider Esbell described as cosmopolitics: being part of affective networks that include live and dead humans, animals, plants, mountains, rivers, ‘spirits’ and ancestral artefacts. Affective networks, that is, that constantly challenge, at an epistemological level, the anthropocentric logic of capitalism.

As part of its collaborations with CARLA, in 2022 the anti-racist collective Identidad Marrón, made up of people who define themselves as descendants of Indigenous people, peasants and migrants, carried out an intervention at the Museo de la Cárcova, in Buenos Aires, aimed at making visible the persistence of structural racism in Argentine art.Footnote ¹ The choice of museum was not accidental: exhibited in its rooms, among other plaster casts, are copies of works from the great European museums such as the Louvre and the Galleria dell’Accademia, brought to Buenos Aires to educate national artists in European aesthetic canons. The intervention of Identidad Marrón consisted of a series of performances by artists identifying as marrón (brown) in some of the rooms where these casts are exhibited.Footnote ² The mere presence of their non-white bodies interrupted a space conceived according to Greco-Roman canons of beauty. They thus exposed the way in which racism and Eurocentrism defined the constituent artistic policies and discourses of Argentine art.

As in Argentina, in much of Latin America the classical European canon has functioned as a model when institutionalising a national art form. However, in most countries of the region there were attempts to hybridise these European ideas with elements that were perceived as more ‘autochthonous’, linked to mestizo, Indigenous or Afro-descendant peoples. Although it was a problematic and controversial matter, most Latin American nations recognised the mediation of non-European factors in the shaping of their cultural imaginary, albeit in a subordinate position. In the Argentine case, on the other hand, the national culture, as conceived by the ruling elites of the late nineteenth century, obliterated any possibility of heterogeneous visions of the nation. The narrative that these elites proposed deliberately rejected mestizaje and promoted, instead, the idea of Argentina as a white and European country (Geler Reference Geler2010; Quijada Reference Quijada, Quijada, Quijada and Schneider2000). According to the official discourses of the time, which persisted through the twentieth century, white and European Argentina was the result of two simultaneous and interrelated processes: the mass arrival of immigrants from Europe and the progressive ‘extinction’ of native peoples and Afro-descendants due to wars, diseases and their supposed racial ‘weakness’.

The whitening of Argentina in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth was not merely an ideological construct. At a time of great transoceanic migrations, Argentina was the Latin American country that received the most immigrants as a proportion of its local inhabitants. But despite the transformative impact of overseas immigration, Argentina never experienced a total Europeanisation of the population. Afro-descendants, native peoples and so-called criollos remained very numerous, especially among the working classes and outside Buenos Aires and the centre of the country. The term criollo is an important one, as it became a common denomination for many people of mixed-race origin. Criollo is most often used in Hispanic America to mean someone of Iberian ancestry born in the Americas.Footnote ³ In Argentina, the term’s usage broadened following the onset of European immigration in the late nineteenth century, and as a reaction to it. It came to encompass people and cultures predating overseas immigration, yet not identified as Afro-descendant or Indigenous. The term maintained this ambiguity, signifying whiteness – because of the long-standing association of criollo with Spanishness – while also suggesting a certain presence of non-white, particularly Indigenous, elements (Chamosa Reference Chamosa2010). In some ways, criollo was analogous to ‘mestizo’, especially in a context where mestizaje was overtly rejected.

Because of the colonial heritage as well as the political and economic directions taken by Argentina after independence, these inhabitants were the ones who received the worst educational and labour opportunities and remained in a subaltern social position. In the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, they were also forced to adopt a civic ideal of nationality that excluded any ethnic-racial difference and assumed the European character of the social formation, which implied for them a silent but systematic racism (Adamovsky Reference Adamovsky2012; Frigerio Reference Frigerio and Lechini2008; Geler Reference Geler2010, 2011; Lamborghini, Geler and Guzmán Reference Lamborghini, Geler and Guzmán2017). Non-white people were integrated into a lower class stripped of any racial reference (Adamovsky Reference Adamovsky2012; Ratier Reference Ratier2022). In other words, everyone was simply ‘Argentine’, without differences. But since the official narrative asserted that Argentines were descendants of Europeans, those who did not fit this national type because of their skin colour or because of their Indigenous, Afro-descendant or mestizo ancestry were forced, by the actions of the ideological state apparatus, to embrace a form of Argentineness that, in practice, condemned them to subaltern positions, socio-economically, politically and culturally (Briones Reference Briones2005; Geler Reference Geler2016). The Argentine nation-state project devised at the end of the nineteenth century was thus based on a double axis: if on the one hand the reproduction of social disparities maintained structural racism (among other forms of discrimination and marginalisation), on the other, it promoted what Michael Omi and Howard Winant (Reference Omi and Winant1994) call a form of ‘racial common sense’ that denied any racial inequality under the pretext of the supposedly homogeneously white and European character of the nation.

Although the pressure exerted on non-white people to accept their subaltern social position and forget their ethno-racial markers was intense, it is important not to assume that they had no agency at all. On the contrary, those who suffered from structural racism and the whitening mandate developed various forms of resistance. Sometimes this involved distancing themselves from ethno-racial identities to embrace other forms of identification (political, territorial or class) in order to improve their life chances and deal with a profoundly unjust social order. A head-on challenge against racism was not always possible, but these people continued in multiple ways to show the limits of Argentine whiteness as a project. In the 1930s, in the context of large migrations of peasants (mostly mestizos) to Buenos Aires and other central cities, these tensions became more acute – and especially with the coming to power of Peronism in the 1940s, which we will discuss later, and as the working classes became politically vocal.

Sergio Caggiano (Reference Caggiano2012) points out that the ‘visual common sense’ in Argentina trains the eye not to read as ‘racial’ differences in phenotype that are nevertheless clearly evident. As Alejandro Frigerio (Reference Frigerio2006) shows, only people with stereotypically and very pronounced African features are perceived as Afro-descendants in Argentina. Similarly, outside of rural or community settings, Indigenous people are often thought of simply as criollos. This explains, in part, the fact that the idea of a uniformly white and European country has coexisted with a demographic reality that, in the public arena and in daily interaction, constantly contradicts it, given the ethnic-racial heterogeneity of the population. But this ‘not seeing’ (what Caggiano calls ‘invisualisation’) is neither systematic nor constant: in certain contexts, differences in skin colour can quickly become very noticeable. A middle- or upper-class white person is likely to immediately notice the phenotype of someone they pass on a deserted street at night if they have a dark complexion. And, while this does not mean that he or she will encode that difference in terms of defined ethno-racial identities (white, Afro-descendant, Indigenous, etc.), this illustrates how phenotypic difference influences forms of social stratification and classification in Argentina, despite the constant affirmation that all Argentines are white and European.

This example also shows how fear and other negative affects can be mobilised by racial factors. In fact, the notion of a ‘civilisation’ besieged and sometimes invaded by ‘barbarism’ has been a constant trope in Argentine history, which has been deployed by the dominant sectors to interpret different political and class conflicts and conjunctures. And although these notions have changed over time, they have generally had racialised underpinnings (Gordillo Reference Gordillo2020). Thus the usual invisibility of racial diversity in dominant discourses has been punctuated by momentary hypervisibilisations of such differences, which activate visceral anxieties and fears and provide affective bases to justify repressive and/or reactionary political projects. As we shall see, the racialisation of Peronist sympathisers in the 1940s or, more recently, the alarm over a nonexistent ‘terrorist’ organisation of the Mapuche people in Patagonia are examples of this.

But beyond these moments of hypervisibilisation, whitening discourses have mean that racial difference is alluded to through other markers of difference, such as education, geographic origin and, above all, social class. In fact, the term negro in Argentina is used generically to refer to poor people (of whatever skin colour and ethnic origin, even if they are phenotypically white). In the colloquial language of Argentines, negro is used to talk about the poor much more frequently than to refer to people of African descent; it generally has a primarily classist, rather than racial, connotation. The term refers to what Lea Geler (Reference Geler2016) calls el negro popular (a Black person of the working classes) and Ezekiel Adamovsky (Reference Adamovsky2012) calls the ‘non-diasporic black’, to differentiate it from an Afro-descendant.Footnote ⁴ At the same time, although not always the case, the implicit stereotype that a poor person will have brown skin often works in practice. Class and race are intertwined.Footnote ⁵

Efforts to impose the idea of a white and European nation were quite successful in terms of public acceptance of the image, but this did not prevent what elites were trying to exclude – mestizo, Indigenous, brown and the Afro-descendant people and elements – from finding forms of expression outside dominant structures and discourses, and sometimes even within them. In the arts, the figure of the gaucho – typified as a brave, unruly, nomadic cowboy, often brown-skinned – is emblematic of this process, as we will show. The cultural sphere constituted a space of struggle in which some of the most fundamental criticisms of the idea of Argentina as a white and European nation took place. In this chapter we outline the relationship between the arts and the struggle against racism in Argentine history, with a focus on specific relevant examples. We will examine various anti-racist artistic experiences and the tensions (and sometimes hybridisations) they have had with a high culture that thought of itself, originally, in European terms, but that could never escape its relationship with the non-white (partly for reasons of guilty fascination).

Our account will include anti-racist artistic expressions articulated around racial subjectivities with a specific ethnic memory – particularly Afro-descendant and Indigenous – but it will go beyond that. This is due to the fact that, precisely because of the characteristics of Argentina’s racial formation and the power of the myth of the white and European nation, Afro-descendant and Indigenous artistic expressions have been less prominent than in other Latin American countries, for example Brazil and Colombia. But, on the other hand – and here it is possible to point out a specific characteristic of the Argentine case – the artistic production of working-class sectors has played a central role in the articulation of strategies that, despite not being explicitly anti-racist, have strongly contributed to challenging structural racism. Either directly or through the mediation of middle-class – or even upper-class – artists, the working-class or ‘non-diasporic’ negros mentioned here managed to have a considerable impact in formulating alternative ways of thinking about the nation and to reinstate the presence and value of non-white people as part of it.

In order to deal with the diversity of materials, we propose a typology in terms of how they position themselves in the face of racism, comprising three categories: visibilising, vindicatory and anti-racist.Footnote ⁶ The visibilising category includes practices that grant artistic presence to ethnic-racial groups that are invisible in the narratives of the nation, although they may do so with stereotypical, exoticising or inferiorising images (e.g. that infantilise or bestialise). In this sense, they cannot be considered anti-racist and, in fact, may contribute to racism. However, in the Argentine context, they take on a different weight due to the centrality of discourses that minimise the very existence of racial diversity. Vindicatory artistic practices present favourable images that contest the mostly negative valuation that Argentine society attributes to subaltern ethnic-racial identities, without fundamentally questioning racism or only doing so obliquely. These vindicatory cultural productions can be related to what Mónica Moreno Figueroa and Peter Wade (Reference Moreno Figueroa and Wade2022) call ‘alternative grammars of anti-racism’ – that is, those dynamics that do not explicitly focus on racism or anti-racism, but that address broader structural inequalities in which the role of racial difference is indirectly acknowledged. Not all vindicatory artistic practices are produced by non-white artists but, in the cases in which this happens, the affirmation generated by self-representation takes on a specific gravitational weight, as it implies taking control of symbolic and political representation and, ultimately, of subjectivity (Fanon Reference Fanon1986). Finally, anti-racist discourses stricto sensu denounce, with varying degrees of regularity and explicitness, the racism suffered by subaltern ethnic-racial groups.

Most of the anti-racist artistic practices stricto sensu have developed in recent years as a result of the impact of multiculturalism in Argentina. However, it is also important to consider the role that vindicatory cultural products have played in the national imaginary. A good part of the struggle against racism in Argentina has been expressed less as a head-on challenge than as a heterogeneous set of rather oblique, denotative, implicit initiatives that have revalued brownness, and its associated cultural forms and ways of life, and undermined the idea of a white and European nation (and therefore, the superiority of whiteness) without attacking it explicitly. Many of these initiatives were led by people – be they professional artists or just ordinary people expressing themselves artistically – who did not necessarily subscribe to any specific racial or ethnic identity, nor did they have distinctive ethnic memories or even a physical appearance that would make them victims of possible racist aggression. Rather than projecting our own expectations about what form anti-racist cultural expressions should take, we will attend instead to the ways in which the people who create cultural products relate to racism.

The Construction of the Nation-State

The beginning of Argentina’s independence process in 1810, and its formal declaration of independence in 1816, brought drastic changes in interethnic relations. In 1813 the so-called caste systemFootnote ⁷ was abolished, and an 1821 electoral law of the province of Buenos Aires – soon imitated by almost all provinces – established the right of suffrage for any free male, of whatever colour, social status or even literacy. For the free male population – which included a large number of Afro-descendants and Indigenous people living in white-controlled cities – this meant a horizon of equality before the law that was quite radical for the time. Racial discrimination continued, but no longer on a formal or legal basis. Those who had been enslaved had to wait much longer. In 1813, a ‘free womb’ law was decreed and there were later prohibitions on the slave trade, but the abolition of slavery would come only in 1853 (or 1860 for the province of Buenos Aires).Footnote ⁸ Moreover, the emergent state controlled only half of Argentina’s current territory during that time. Parts of the Pampas and the Chaco, and the entirety of Patagonia, were under the control of independent Indigenous communities, with whom the Argentine state maintained ties but on whom it also periodically visited military violence.

The triumph of the Buenos Aires liberals over the interior provinces in 1862, after decades of internal conflict over how to organise the new nation, was preceded and accompanied by strongly racist narratives and discourses, including in literature and essays, where Afro-descendants, Indigenous people and mestizos were demonised. Paradigmatic examples of this are ‘El matadero’ (The Slaughterhouse, 1838, published in 1871) by Esteban Echeverría and Amalia (1851) by José Mármol, widely considered in Argentina, respectively, to be the first national short story and novel. La cautiva (The Captive, 1837), an epic poem by Echeverría, recounted the capture of a white woman and her husband by Patagonian Indigenous people, symbols of the perceived threats to white society (Malosetti Costa Reference Malosetti Costa2022). In 1845, Domingo F. Sarmiento published his book Facundo, of enormous influence in Argentina and the rest of Latin America, in which he read the political conflicts and development possibilities of the time as an ongoing struggle between ‘civilisation’ and ‘barbarism’. In this view, the former was rooted, in part, in whiteness and Europeanness, while the latter flourished in the rural world of the gauchos and the Indigenous and mestizo lower classes.

From 1879 onwards, the national army quickly and violently occupied the territories of the Pampa and Patagonia (and eventually the Chaco in the northeast) that had been under the control of Indigenous peoples. This was part of a process of consolidation and modernisation of the state and the Argentine economy, which sought to insert itself definitively into the international system as an exporter of raw materials for industrialised countries, particularly the United Kingdom. With the rapid urbanisation of the Pampa region and the mass arrival of immigrants in the following decades, the advance of the project that the elites called ‘progress’ or ‘civilisation’ seemed assured. The narratives of Argentine modernisation that flourished at this time presented Indigenous cultures and the African presence (and soon also the gaucho world) as things of the past, of which only fast-disappearing relics remained. At the end of the century, the idea of a completely white and European nation seemed at first sight convincing.

At the intellectual, literary or academic art level, for the time being, there was little possibility of opposing the racism of official discourse or the idea of a white and European Argentina, which was in fact partly promoted in official cultural production. Between the 1850s and 1880s, on the other hand, the Afro-descendant community of Buenos Aires (known as afroporteños) maintained an appreciable presence in the public sphere, including via several newspapers of their own in which they defended themselves against racial prejudice. There were also Black poets, such as Horacio Mendizábal, Mateo Elejalde and Casildo Thompson, who published explicitly anti-racist works. After this period, however, due to the pressure for acculturation coming from the dominant sectors (and from part of the Afro-descendant community that sought integration into the national project), the Afroporteño community entered a long period of invisibility in the public domain (Geler Reference Geler2010; Lewis Reference Lewis1996).

In this period, Indigenous cultural production began to be classified within the incipient ethnographic collections of the Museo de la Plata and the Museo Etnográfico de Buenos Aires, both recently founded (Podgorny Reference Podgorny1999). These collections followed the criteria of European rescue anthropology that sought to generate archives of ‘cultures’ supposedly in imminent disappearance. They were organised by region and did not record the authorship of the objects collected. The collections were supplemented by raciological studies of Indigenous people who were taken prisoner in the military outposts and kept in captivity in the La Plata Museum (where many died), and by the examination of Indigenous skeletal remains exhumed without consent.

In popular culture at the turn of the century, especially in the cities, there were extraordinarily vivacious expressions of the heterogeneity of the lower classes, where immigrants from many nations, internal migrants, criollos, Indigenous people, mestizos and Afro-descendants coexisted. Although they did not have an explicit anti-racist message, unique cultural expressions emerged that highlighted ethnic diversity. Examples of this are carnival and tango (which at the time showed their African roots more clearly than would later be the case): they both reaffirmed the presence of the non-white as part of the nation and subtly undermined the official whitening messages.

In turn, the enormous success of José Hernández’s poem Martín Fierro, published as a cheap pamphlet in 1872, deeply marked Argentine culture, especially among the lower classes. This particular type of popular criollismo, produced mainly by white upper- and middle-class letrados (men of letters) but aimed at lower-class audiences, turned the gaucho – precisely the figure that official discourses had considered as belonging to the barbaric past – into a hero of the people and an emblem of the nation. The phenomenon points to a distinctive tension in Argentine cultural identity: even as official discourse promoted a white, European ideal, there persisted a widespread desire, cutting across social classes, for cultural authenticity rooted in more autochthonous traditions. For the working classes, criollismo provided a means to assert their presence in national culture. For white elites and middle classes, it offered a way to claim cultural legitimacy and connection to an imagined authentic national past, while maintaining their social position. This complex dynamic helps explain how criollismo could become a powerful national emblem while simultaneously challenging aspects of official racial narratives. In popular criollismo culture, the gaucho hero was frequently portrayed as a dark-skinned, often mestizo, individual who associated with Indigenous and Afro-descendant people and coexisted with them as part of the same criollo world that these stories exalted (Adamovsky Reference Adamovsky2019). And it is not a minor fact that some of the most famous creators in the criollo genre – such as Gabino Ezeiza, who was a famous criollo payador (wandering minstrel) – were themselves of African descent.

From the Centennial to the First Mass Culture (1910–1943)

Between 1880 and 1914, just over four million people, mostly Europeans, arrived in Argentina, of whom 70–75 per cent stayed permanently (Adamovsky Reference Adamovsky2020; Brown Reference Brown2011). The narrative of Argentina as a white and European country relied on the role that the enormous overseas immigration would have in ‘dissolving’ all remnants of the non-white population. But the elites expected migrants from northern Europe, home to the ‘race’ that was supposed to lead the world’s march towards progress. Those who arrived, instead, were mostly Italians and Spaniards of humble origin and, in many cases, with anarchist or socialist leanings.

The need to assert dominance over these foreign-born masses and to reaffirm the social order in the face of revolutionary ideas drove an intellectual movement of a nationalist bent that became more prominent after 1910, drawing on celebrations for the Centenary of the May Revolution. In this context, three voices stood out. Manuel Gálvez reaffirmed the Spanish and Catholic heritage of the cultural traditions of pre-immigration Argentina. Leopoldo Lugones promoted a cult of nationality centred on the gaucho, who as we have seen was already admired by the lower classes. But the gaucho he claimed was a mythical, almost Greco-Latin gaucho, who epitomised the supposedly superior values (nobility, patriotism, virility) that characterised, in his opinion, Argentina’s national type prior to immigration (Adamovsky Reference Adamovsky2019). Finally, Ricardo Rojas did criticise the idea of white and European Argentina by advocating for a mestizo national tradition that combined the European with the Indigenous, although he conceived of the latter as a spiritual legacy and an aesthetic substratum of Argentineness, rather than as a biological contribution to contemporary Argentines. However, none of these three authors was interested in recovering the Afro cultural legacy. These intellectuals, part of a trend known in Argentine intellectual history as ‘cultural nationalism’, opened a new scenario of revalorisation of the local vis-à-vis the European; but this did not mean the end of racist prejudices, which remained very present.

Despite its limitations, this debate paved the way for other, more profound challenges. The impact of the ideas of writers such as Rojas and Lugones was felt by visual artists, who from the 1920s onwards chose to paint Indigenous or mestizo characters set in scenes from the interior of the country and also gauchos and criollos from the Pampa region, in whom mestizo features or brownish skins could often be distinguished (Penhos Reference Penhos, Penhos and Wechsler1999). Cesáreo Bernaldo de Quirós stands out in this sense (see Figure 3.1). Also influenced by leftist ideas and anti-imperialism, Antonio Berni represented the Argentine working people as having racially diverse bodies (see Figure 3.2).

Figure 3.1 El lancero colorado/El poncho rojo by Cesáreo B. de Quirós, 1923, from the cover of Nativa, a nationalist magazine

(photo by E. Adamovksy, courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional, Argentina).

Figure 3.2 Manifestación, painting by Antonio Berni, 1934

(© The Berni estate, by permission).

During this period, wherein Argentina exhibited a pace of modernisation and urbanisation exceeding the Latin American average, popular culture and mass culture (produced by middle-class creators but aimed at various audiences) contributed to rendering the heterogeneity of the nation visible. Popular criollismo deepened the connection which it had been making between the gaucho and non-whiteness. Although many of these images and representations relied problematically on stereotyped images (such as the famous illustrations of gauchos by the artist Florencio Molina Campos), they contributed to making diversity visible and, consequently, implicitly questioned the idea that the Argentine people were white and European. In the first decades of the twentieth century, two of the most famous Argentine comic strips emerged, both with non-white protagonists: Las aventuras del Negro Raúl (1916, by Arturo Lanteri), inspired by the Afro-descendant dandy Raúl Grigera, and Patoruzú (1928, by Dante Quinterno), about a Tehuelche Indigenous man of great fortune and superhuman strength (Alberto Reference Alberto2022; McAleer Reference McAleer2018). Although both reproduced grotesque images of Black and Indigenous people (both characters were presented as unintelligent), in Patoruzú this was combined with admirable characteristics such as heroism and altruism.

The only explicitly anti-racist approach in the arts at that time came from Martín Castro, an anarchist criollo payador, who in 1928 wrote a long gaucho narrative poem entitled Los gringos del país (The Country’s Gringos), published shortly after as part of the collections of cheap booklets of gaucho adventures made available for popular consumption. The poem was a veritable counter-history of Argentina, told from the point of view of the Indigenous people, dispossessed and oppressed by Europeans and their descendants for 400 years. The gauchos that Castro exalted were of trigueño complexion (literally, wheat-coloured, i.e. brown) and direct descendants of both Indigenous people and the ‘white’ Argentines in turn descended from Europeans, who were their enemies (Adamovsky Reference Adamovsky2019).

Also in the 1920s, the folk music of the northwest region acquired the status of a commercial genre and by the following decade there was already an established circuit of artists. The lyrics of some of its songs, especially those of Atahualpa Yupanqui and Buenaventura Luna, reinstated in the national imaginary the presence of mestizo and Indigenous populations. For musicians, having native lineage and brownish complexion even functioned as a mark of authenticity (Chamosa Reference Chamosa2010; Adamovsky Reference Adamovsky2019). In the 1930s and the beginning of the following decade, moreover, people in the world of tango recovered memories about the music’s Afro-descendant roots (made invisible in the previous years), while two Afro rhythms from the Rio de la Plata region were revalidated: milonga and candombe. Although less prominent, local jazz also gave rise to a revalorisation of Blackness. The world-renowned guitarist Oscar Alemán, who had a very dark complexion and presented himself as Afro-descendant, shone in this period (Karush Reference Karush, Alberto and Elena2016).

Thus, by the early 1940s, state and school messages, which affirmed that the nation was white and European, coexisted in tension with a powerful popular and mass culture, which produced images of the Argentine that reinstated the presence of non-whiteness and, at times, affectively revalued it. The fact that these cultural productions were largely created by members of the same middle class who, from other places, simultaneously promoted the image of a white Argentina, explains why the clash of visions remained latent. With the partial exception of Martín Castro, Argentine racism was not yet openly discussed by cultural creators, nor was the idea that the nation was or should aspire to be ‘white’ challenged head-on.

Peronism and the Emergence of the cabecita negra (1943–1955)

The emergence of Peronism in the mid 1940s caused an upheaval in the idea of Argentina as an extension of Europe. As a political movement, it served to unify and articulate different sectors of the population, including both white people of European descent and others of mestizo or even Indigenous descent. The latter were, in general, provincial migrants who, attracted by job opportunities in the cities from the 1930s onwards, had progressively settled in the urban peripheries, particularly in Buenos Aires (Ratier Reference Ratier1971). Although workers of all aspects and ethnic origins supported Juan Perón, it was the provincial migrants who became metonymic signifiers of the entire Peronist movement and the urban proletariat (Grimson Reference Grimson2017).

Faced with the growing unity and voice of the working classes, a powerful anti-Peronist movement was formed almost immediately among the middle and affluent sectors. They now had to share public spaces with dark-skinned internal migrants, who were derogatorily called cabecitas negras (little black heads), and who now ventured beyond the periphery and into traditionally white areas of the city. Among the white and European middle and upper classes, this produced affective reactions and intensities that were channelled into emotions of different kinds – in particular, fear and disgust – and that nourished moral and political discourses. The anti-Peronists aimed from the beginning to discredit their adversaries not only in political terms but also morally, aesthetically and racially. They branded their enemies as vulgar, dirty, irrational and unable to adapt to the conventions of urban modernity. But these differences were also essentialised and racialised: Peronists were also attacked using racial categories such as mestizo, negro and indio; they were accused of being ‘hard haired’ (i.e. with African-type hair) and, especially, of being cabecitas negras. Thus, from its genesis, anti-Peronism was not only structured around ideological issues but also had an affective substratum articulated around racial issues.

Peronism, meanwhile, remained strictly within a discourse of class and did not respond explicitly in the terms in which the opposition framed the discussion. Its rhetoric was expressed in a class language that posed the conflict as a struggle between the working people – without distinction of race – and the oligarchy (Garguin Reference Garguin2007; Milanesio Reference Milanesio, Karush and Chamosa2010). The problem of differences in skin colour was not a topic for Peronists, nor was there an explicit vindication of the brown-skinned Argentine. In fact, where racism was mentioned, it was rather to deny that it existed in Argentina. The denunciation of Argentine racism, the vindication of the cabecita negra and its transformation into an icon of Peronism and the deep roots of the nation would take place only after the overthrow of Perón in 1955 (Adamovsky Reference Adamovsky2019). As in previous periods, the idea of a white and European Argentina was discussed implicitly and indirectly in the sphere of mass culture and through a language of visuality and aurality. Although the propaganda apparatus of the Peronist state continued to represent the Argentine people through European-looking bodies, a greater presence of images that featured mestizos was evident in these years (Adamovsky Reference Adamovsky, Alberto and Elena2016). One example is the use of the mestizo figure ‘Juan Pueblo’ in a poster promoting Perón’s Five Year Plan (1947–1951) to modernise and industrialise the country (see Figure 3.3; the text reads ‘The vigour of a strong people is a giant step towards national recovery’).

Figure 3.3 A mestizo ‘Juan Pueblo’ in a promotional poster for the Five Year Plan, El Laborista, 10 June 1947, p. 8

Figure 3.3 long description.

(photo by E. Adamovksy, courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional, Argentina).

Figure 3.3Long description

The man wears gaucho garb of bombachos or baggy trousers, a shirt, a pañuelo or silk scarf tied at the neck, a broad-brimmed hat and boots. The man has the remnants of a broken chain attached to each ankle. The text on the poster reads: The power of a strong people taking a gigantic step towards national recovery. 1947–1951, Five Year Plan.

The representation of Black Argentines was much rarer, though notable examples exist. One such case shows Perón with an Afro-Argentine child in an illustration for a story titled ‘Chocolate’, about an Afro-Argentine boy who was bullied at school, published in the regime’s main propaganda magazine, Mundo Peronista (Peronist World) (see Figure 3.4). While this image could be interpreted as patronising and its title problematic, it nevertheless challenges local racism: the white state school uniform, the company of other (white) boys and Perón’s affection acknowledge the Black child as part of the nation at a time when dominant discourses denied the existence of Afro-Argentines.

Figure 3.4 Juan Perón with an Afro-Argentine child, illustration from Mundo Peronista 84, 15 April 1955, p. 32

Figure 3.4 long description.

(photo by E. Adamovksy, courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional, Argentina).

Figure 3.4Long description

The page is divided by the title word Chocolate, which includes the face of the eponymous Afro-descendant child within the capital C. Above the title, a schoolroom scene shows one Afro-descendant boy among his Euro-descendant peers, facing a Euro-descendant teacher. Below the title, in an exterior scene with a car in the background, Perón interacts with four schoolchildren, including the boy Chocolate, the protagonist of the story for which the image is an illustration.

As before, popular criollismo continued to channel these debates. The same happened with music of mass consumption. To give just one example, the biggest hit record in Argentine history was a 1950 song, ‘El rancho’e la Cambicha’ (Cambicha’s House), performed by Antonio Tormo, strongly identified with the Peronist regime (Chamosa Reference Chamosa2010). The lyrics describe in the first person the preparations of a man who is about to go to a rural boliche (popular dance) run by a woman known as Cambicha. Without being expressly anti-racist, its celebration of popular festivities and of the positive affects related to the enjoyment of music and dance, conflicts, albeit indirectly, with the ideal of the white, European people. The lyrics contain words in Indigenous languages: cambicha, in fact, is the feminine diminutive of cambá, which in Guaraní designates people with dark or black skin.

While there were allusive and indirect ways of thematising ethnic-racial differences, during these years there was no specific militancy along these lines. Afro-Argentines did not have a public voice, as they had had in the nineteenth century, although they did have private spaces in which they maintained their own cultural practices, such as the dances of the Shimmy Club of Buenos Aires, which operated from the 1920s to the 1970s (Frigerio Reference Frigerio and Lechini2008). A development worth noting is that in 1946 the Kolla Indigenous people achieved unprecedented visibility in the national press when they organised the so-called Malón de la Paz (Peace Raid), a march on foot from Jujuy to Buenos Aires to reclaim their ancestral lands. It was the starting point of an indigenist movement in the country, which developed more strongly in the 1970s (Lenton Reference Lenton, Karush and Chamosa2010).

Conservative Reaction and Political Radicalisation (1955–1976)

In 1955, a coup d’état deposed the government of Perón, who went into exile until 1973. During this period, in which the Peronist Party was banned, military regimes alternated with civilian governments of weak legitimacy. The overthrow of Perón constituted an anti-plebeian reaction that sought to defuse the capacity for action of the working class and, given the veiled racial substratum of the political conflict, to restore the pre-eminence of what was seen as the true Argentina, rooted in middle-classness and Europeanness. In a scenario that combined the proscription of Peronism and the continuation of racism, the first explicit public debate on skin-colour discrimination in Argentina took place (racism had been openly discussed before, but only in reference to Jews). In the 1950s, authors such as Jorge Abelardo Ramos and Arturo Jauretche wrote widely circulated essays linking the anti-Peronist reaction to the interests of the oligarchy, to imperialism and to the racist views which, according to them, were held by a substantial part of the middle class. In the 1960s, authors of the ‘new left’ such as Juan José Sebreli also took up the topic of the oblique racism of those who identified themselves as being middle-class and of European descent. Reversing the negative charge that it had had among the anti-Peronists, sectors of Peronism now vindicated the idea of cabecitas negras as an emblem of plebeian Argentina and authentic nationality. The fact that Peronism was the party of the cabecitas negras was now proof of the popular roots that the party proudly claimed. To this scenario was added the transnational influence of the decolonisation process in Asia and Africa, the civil struggles of African Americans and, particularly, the proliferation of left-wing anti-imperialist movements in Latin America inspired by the success of the Cuban revolution. All of this gave greater resonance to the anti-racist struggle and projected the vindication of Black and Indigenous America.

In the arts, the affirmation of the non-white Argentina had numerous examples, of which we can mention only a handful. The well-known short story ‘Cabecita negra’ (1961) by Germán Rozenmacher, a writer of Peronist leanings, describes, from the perspective of a racist white, middle-class character named Lanari, the paranoid fears of the Buenos Aires petite bourgeoisie regarding immigrants from the interior. The story narrates, from Lanari’s point of view, an ambiguous and tense situation the protagonist experiences when two people he perceives as cabecitas negras momentarily occupy his apartment. The end of the story, in which Lanari is convinced of the need to use the army to ‘crush’ all the cabecitas negras and negros, anticipates the Argentine bourgeoisie’s support for the militaristic and repressive tactics used by the state in dealing with the working classes in the 1970s; it makes visible the role of racism as the affective basis of that coercive turn.

In the visual arts the most obvious example is the work of Ricardo Carpani, who devoted much of his work to the illustration of political pamphlets and posters that supported working-class causes. The bodies he chose to represent the Argentine people deliberately showed non-European features (see Figure 3.5).

Figure 3.5 ¡¡Basta!! poster by Ricardo Carpani, 1963

(© Verónica Carpani, by permission; photograph by Sergio Redondo, courtesy of TAREA-UNSAM).

Cinema also raised the issue of racism as an integral part of the narratives of Latin American emancipation of the time. For example, the pinnacle of Latin American political documentary, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s La hora de los hornos (1968, The Hour of the Furnaces), denounces the structural racism suffered by native populations and chooses to show non-white bodies (and a soundtrack that includes Afro-derived rhythms) to represent the oppressed Latin American population. However, it relapses into patronising views of Indigenous people as backward, apolitical and in need of guidance and leadership from urban revolutionaries, reproducing some of the paternalistic attitudes it seeks to criticise.

Finally, popular music was rich in evocations of non-whiteness as part of the nation. In particular, folkloric music – which during this period achieved an unprecedented popularity – affirmed Indigenous legacies and the connection of things Argentine with the cultural spaces of mestizo Latin America. While songs often relied on problematic indigenist tropes that romanticised Indigenous people as noble savages or relegated them to a mythical past, they nevertheless helped challenge the idea of Argentina as exclusively white and European. The repertoires of singers Mercedes ‘La Negra’ Sosa and Daniel Toro are good examples.

In the early 1970s, the fervour of the working classes also reached Indigenous peoples, who started initiatives to coordinate the struggles of different peoples. Afro-Argentines, on the other hand, continued to have no public voice as such. The lower classes mobilised as never before, but there was no activism specifically focused on anti-racism in these years. However, as we have seen, cultural, trade union, social and political militancy did not completely avoid the issue.

Dictatorship, Neoliberalism and Democracy (1976–2003)

The military dictatorship that was installed after the 1976 coup d’état and remained until 1983 sought the total dismemberment of the working classes as political actors through a programme of terror and political repression, economic disciplining and the weakening of social ties and other notions of solidarity. It also attempted to reaffirm a vision of national identity anchored in whiteness and European origins. The repression dismantled incipient Indigenous efforts at coordination and also affected the cultural sphere. Many artists were murdered, disappeared, exiled or forced to keep a low profile to avoid reprisals. Among those mentioned here, Ricardo Carpani, Mercedes Sosa, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino went into exile; Daniel Toro remained in the country, but his songs were banned.

The return of democracy in 1983, together with the impact of discourses of multiculturalism sponsored by international organisations, opened up new opportunities for Indigenous communities, which in the 1980s reorganised and presented claims in terms of human rights, in line with the international prominence such rights had acquired during the brutal military regime (Briones, Cañuqueo, Kropff and Leuman Reference Briones, Cañuqueo, Kropff and Leuman2007). Together with historical demands for ancestral land, this implied a greater emphasis on issues of ethnicity, identity and recognition, which was often expressed at the cultural level. Communities everywhere began to recover their languages, music and traditions. The Mapuche singer Aimé Painé was one of the most outstanding voices in this regard. Although she never managed to record an album, she performed in the country and abroad, working tirelessly as an artist and activist to make Mapuche people aware of their own history and culture and to make them visible among other non-white groups (Navarro Hartmann Reference Navarro Hartmann2015). The demands of native peoples attracted the attention of white artists. For example, Argentine cinema dedicated many films to Indigenous peoples during this period, among which stand out Gerónima (directed by Raúl Alberto Tosso, 1986) with the Mapuche actress Luisa Calcumil in the leading role, La deuda interna (The Internal Debt, directed by Miguel Pereira, 1988) and El largo viaje de Nahuel Pan (Nahuel Pan’s Long Journey, directed by Jorge Zuhair Jury, 1995). Only in the twenty-first century did an incipient movement of cinema made by Indigenous peoples themselves emerge, generated by their participation in training workshops for young communicators (Torres Agüero Reference Torres Agüero2013) and inspired by the boom in Indigenous audiovisual production in the rest of Latin America (Schiwy Reference Schiwy2009; Córdoba Reference Córdoba2011; Soler Reference Soler2017).

The first post-dictatorship government (under Raúl Alfonsín, 1983–1989) ended in hyperinflation and a deep economic crisis. His successor, the Peronist Carlos Menem, who governed until 1999, implemented one of the most drastic neoliberal adjustment programmes in the world, which raised poverty and unemployment levels to record highs and provoked a crisis of representation. The weakening of the state’s integrative capacity opened the door to a profound questioning of the myth of white and European Argentina and the emergence of alternative identities. The drastic impoverishment experienced by the middle sectors (supposedly ‘white and European’ people) during the 1990s – and intensified by an extreme economic crisis in 2001 – caused increasing anxieties. Rooted in the persistent affective substratum of racism in Argentina, these fears were often expressed through racial language and were codified in terms of a symbolic ‘darkening’ of the nation, given the historical association of mestizo, Indigenous and Afro elements with poverty (Aguiló Reference Aguiló2018). As Alejandro Frigerio (Reference Frigerio2006) demonstrates, references to the ‘Latin Americanisation’ and even the ‘Africanisation’ of Argentina were common in political and media discourse during the 2001 crisis. At the same time, the crisis led to Argentine racism being discussed more frequently in the media.

In the 1990s there was a marked process of re-ethnicisation, which included the reappearance of native groups such as the Rankulches, Huarpes or Selk’nam, which had been declared extinct (Gordillo and Hirsch Reference Gordillo and Hirsch2010). The 1994 reform of the National Constitution included, for the first time, the recognition of the pre-existence of native peoples in Argentina before colonisation, adding to international recognition (such as International Labour Organization treaty 169), and advancing on the provincial recognition that had been achieved in some regions (Carrasco Reference Carrasco2000; Briones Reference Briones2005). In 1995, the Instituto Nacional contra la Discriminación, la Xenofobia y el Racismo (National Institute Against Discrimination, Xenophobia and Racism, INADI), was created with the principal objective of receiving complaints about discrimination and prosecuting citizens accused of acts of discrimination or hatred. Although both Indigenous recognition and the creation of INADI were propitiated by international contexts of expansion of multiculturalist policies as new forms of international governance (see Briones Reference Briones2005; Hale Reference Hale2005), these movements would have been impossible without the pressures of national organisations and activisms (Lenton Reference Lenton, Karush and Chamosa2010). At this time, associations of Afro-Argentines also began to reappear, aiming to make their presence visible and revalue their cultural legacy (Frigerio, Lamborghini and de Maffia Reference Frigerio, Lamborghini and de Maffia2011).

In popular culture, from the 1990s onwards, there was also an increase in the reaffirmation of native peoples, although mostly by non-Indigenous people. This was most noticeable in music. The fifth centenary of Columbus’s arrival prompted critical commemorative songs by two of the most important names in national rock, León Gieco and Los Fabulosos Cadillacs: respectively ‘Cinco siglos igual’ (Five Centuries Without Change) and ‘Quinto centenario’ (Fifth Centenary). Other rock bands produced similar content at the time, such as A.N.I.M.A.L. (acronym for Acosados Nuestros Indios Murieron Al Luchar, Our Indians Died Fighting), Almafuerte, La Renga and Malón. In the realm of folk music, the Mapuche singer Rubén Patagonia stands out. However, with the exception of Patagonia, none of these musicians identified as Indigenous, and most of their mentions of native peoples reinforced the idea of Indigenous peoples as located in the past.

The band Todos Tus Muertos, led by the Afro-descendant and Rastafarian Fidel Nadal – son of Enrique Nadal, a film director and early leader in the fight for the recognition of Afro-Argentines – had great commercial success with Dale aborígen (Go, Aborigine, 1994), an album that mixed Afro-Latin rhythms with rap, punk, reggae and ska. The album included several denunciations of racism, although focused on international figures such as the Zapatistas, Malcom X, Patrice Lumumba and Nelson Mandela.

In cuarteto music – a popular music from the province of Córdoba – Carlos ‘La Mona’ Jiménez, the genre’s top star and, aside from Nadal, the only artist among those we mention in this section who has a phenotype read by many Argentinians as Afro-descendant, praised the ‘skin of my race, Black race’ in his highly successful album Raza Negra (1994). In another of his compositions, ‘Por portación de rostro’ (2006, Because of the Face, i.e. racial profiling), he also alluded to the racism suffered by those with ‘dark skin’. The fact that Jiménez is considered an icon of the negro popular indicates that, despite their being usually differentiated, sometimes there is room for overlapping between plebeian Blackness and ethnic Afro identity.

The most pointed anti-racist approaches in the musical realm of this period were seen in so-called cumbia villera, in which also, for the first time in the twentieth century, signs appeared of ‘Blackness’ becoming an emblem of defiant pride among the working class. Cumbia villera is a subgenre of cumbia created by musicians coming from low-income and precarious neighbourhoods, called villas in Argentina (Cragnolini Reference Cragnolini2006; Semán and Vila Reference Semán and Vila2011, Reference Semán and Vila2012).Footnote ⁹ It became an unexpected success in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with lyrics that often narrated, in the first person, the alleged daily experiences of the pibes (young men) of the slums. Themes of alcohol and drug consumption, leisure time, delinquency and misogynist and heteronormative sexuality in villera lyrics, added to the poetic importance of ideas of marginalised territories and the preference for a look based on sportswear, earned the music comparisons with gangsta rap, by which it was in fact inspired (Martin Reference Martín2008).

One of the innovations of cumbia villera was to make visible the fact that the working class suffered not only a form of class violence but also racist violence. It contributed to an affirmation of the negro villero (heir of the cabecita negra), stigmatised from above, as a positive identification. The band Meta Guacha presented songs in which they identified themselves as negros, antagonistically opposed to those with ‘light skin’ and put forward visions of popular joyfulness related to Blackness. Pablo Lescano, one of the best-known artists of the genre, has the proud phrase 100% negro cumbiero tattooed on his chest and it is common for him to harangue his audience at concerts by shouting ‘Las palmas de todos los negros ¡arriba!’ (all the negros put their hands in the air!), eliciting enthusiastic responses from his followers. By exposing the racial dimensions of the material and symbolic violence systematically experienced by young people in poor neighbourhoods, and by proposing strategies for appropriating and reversing these forms of racialisation, cumbia villera, despite its other problematic aspects (e.g. its gender politics), constitutes an important phenomenon in the recent anti-racist cultural production of Argentina.

The Recent Scenario (since 2003)

The institutionalisation and recognition of ethnic-racial collectives that took place at the end of the 1990s and the turn of the century generated a context that allowed for the growth of ethnic-racial organisations, the expansion of rights and forms of recognition and the provision of certain resources. But it also generated new challenges. It is relevant to mention two. In relation to both Indigenous peoples and Afro-descendants there was a demand for ‘authenticity’, even when self-recognition was the fundamental criterion, used for example in the census. The registration of Indigenous communities, for instance, requires a socio-historical report proving that the collective has verifiable ties to an Indigenous nation and that it is a social unit. At the same time, very light-skinned people who identified as Afro-descendants encountered resistance to being recognised as such (Geler Reference Geler2016). Cultural representations thus became mediated by the demand to demonstrate ‘authentic’ difference in order to achieve recognition. Any aspect that was seen as ambiguous gave rise to doubts about authenticity (Briones Reference Briones2005; Vivaldi Reference Vivaldi2016).

With the arrival of Kirchnerism in 2003, the demands for more pluralistic visions of the nation coming from different spheres – Indigenous, Afro-descendant and migrant activists, the working classes and progressive sectors – found even more echoes in the state. The government developed ambitious cultural policies in this respect, especially after the inauguration of Cristina Kirchner as president in 2007. The clearest example was the organisation of the celebrations for the Bicentennial of the May Revolution in 2010, which included large-scale events by the experimental theatre company Fuerza Bruta. Kirchner’s government systematically emphasised the contrasts between these celebrations and those of the 1910 Centennial. The Secretary of Culture, Jorge Coscia, wrote:

One of the central moments was the Bicentennial Parade, which attracted two million people along its route through the avenues of Buenos Aires. Through nineteen tableaux, this parade of floats represented major milestones of Argentine history and popular culture, from a sensory and affective perspective rather than a narrative and chronological one. In other words, rather than promoting a particular interpretation of Argentine history and nationhood in line with the traditional official vision, the event sought to generate an emotional response in the public through audiovisual stimuli and the energy generated by the crowds of people in the public space.

The first scene of the parade symbolised the native peoples. It consisted of three floats carrying Indigenous performers from different native nations, with their traditional costumes, masks, paintings and tools.Footnote ¹⁰ The second, entitled ‘The Argentine Republic’, showed dancers dressed in the colours of the national flag, suspended in the air from a crane, representing the homeland.Footnote ¹¹ The two female dancers selected to share this role had been deliberately chosen for their mixed-race features. Hanging from a harness, the young women danced to the rhythm of carnavalito (a northern folkloric genre with a strong Indigenous Kolla influence) and candombe – as well as electronic music – to emphasise the ethnically heterogeneous character of the nation. A group of dancers and musicians accompanied the float. Musical allusions to the quintessentially plebeian celebration (carnival), in its Andean and Afro-descendant manifestations, were combined with the young women’s constant encouragements to the people to join in the dancing in the street. All this accentuated the staging of the nation in a multicultural and subaltern key and the event as a popular festival, mobilising various emotions, particularly joy (Citro Reference Citro2017). Some of other floats in the parade showed different episodes of Argentine history, in some of which Afro-descendant actors participated. Alongside European immigrants, there was even room for the visibilisation of others, such as Bolivians and Chinese.

According to the official plan, the order of the first two floats should have been the reverse – first the Republic, then the Indigenous peoples – but a last-minute glitch forced the change to be improvised. President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner later admitted: ‘What had to happen happened, which was fairer and more historically rigorous, the originary peoples at the beginning’ (2019: 256). In this almost accidental way, the parade proposed a refoundation of the nation located in Indigenous cultures and not in the Revolution of 1810. And although the scene fell back on a conception of Indigeneity essentialised and located in the past – the public television narration systematically used the imperfect tense to refer to the originary peoples, while the costumes and scenery of the floats had almost no present-day references – the fact that the performers were, to a large extent, Indigenous distanced it from the indigenist nativism of cultural manifestations of other decades (see Ko Reference Ko2013).

Despite its positive elements, the opening by the Kirchnerist government to resignifications of Argentina in multicultural terms that had been introduced during Menemism sometimes came into conflict with Indigenous and Afro-descendant organisations, in part because of the attempted capture, by the state apparatus, of the discourses and affective energies of these associations and, in the case of native peoples, by the continuation of neo-extractivism, agribusiness and the conflict over land (Svampa Reference Svampa2019). However, in general, Kirchnerism marked an important contrast with previous official discourses and cultural policies by contributing to the distancing that society had already begun, on the way to the 2001 crisis, from the image of a homogeneously white nation. The impact it had on the field of artistic production was substantial: anti-racist messages and the vindication of the non-white as part of the nation seeped everywhere, from literature to cinema and TV, from music to popular celebrations (e.g. Citro and Torres Agüero Reference Citro and Agüero2015).

None of this means that the more traditional views have dissipated. Racism continued stubbornly and even acquired a more aggressive tone, as the voices questioning it multiplied. The coming to power of the liberal-conservative Mauricio Macri in 2015 implied, in part, an attempt to return to an idea of nation of European genealogy. The audiovisual production of the state under his presidency reversed the previous tendency to represent Argentina through varied bodies, with a strong presence of non-whites. Under his successor Alberto Fernández (2019–2023), by contrast, the state developed anti-racist policies through INADI and the Dirección Nacional de Equidad Racial, Personas Migrantes y Refugiadas (National Directorate of Racial Equity, Migrants and Refugees), created in 2020 and directed by Carlos Álvarez Nazareno, an Afro-descendant activist.

In the midst of these implicit struggles about the ethnic-racial profile of the nation, there have been interesting developments in the field of culture and activism, some of which became sites for collaboration for the CARLA project. One such is the Mapuche Theatre Group El Katango (see Chapter 6). Founded in 2002 in the Patagonian city of Bariloche by the Mapuche theatre maker, teacher and researcher Miriam Álvarez (co-author of Chapter 6), El Katango was formed in the space for political debate and theatrical creation called the Mapuche self-affirmation campaign Wefkvletuyiñ (‘We are Re-emerging’ in Mapuzugun). Another CARLA collaborator is the theatre company Teatro en Sepia (TES), founded in 2010 (again see Chapter 6, co-written by TES director Alejandra Egido). TES seeks to break the historical indifference and invisibility of the Afro presence in Argentina through the performing arts. Although TES and El Katango emerged in the context just described, in which legal recognition had allowed ethnic-racial collectives a way of working with the state while society as a whole was beginning to accept Argentina’s ethnic-racial plurality, both theatre groups still had to confront invisibilisation, racist stereotypes, the essentialisation of identity and racist structures of territorial dispossession and the criminalisation of Mapuche people, as well as marginalisation in the urban space and labour segregation for Afro women.

To the panorama of artistic initiatives that made visible the claims of Indigenous and Afro peoples, a new element was added in 2019 with the founding of Identidad Marrón, the anti-racist art collective with which we started this chapter, which in a very short time gained a place in public conversations. The novelty of their approach lies partly in the introduction of the term marrón, which they chose as a deliberate act of reclamation and political visibility. While negro has historically been wielded as a class-based slur, there has also been a tendency to resort to words such as trigueño (wheat-coloured), moreno or morocho when referring to people with darker skin tones – terms that have been used to sidestep explicit discussions of race. By embracing marrón as a new term for classifying people, the collective deliberately sidesteps the old familiar euphemisms, forcing a more direct conversation about race and identity in Argentine society.

The other novel aspect of Identidad Marrón’s approach is that they aspire to an anti-racist policy that relies not on discrete minority communities but on the majority that makes up the working classes, who have brownish skins and non-white features but who are often unaware of their precise ethnic origins. Identidad Marrón aspires to give voice to the marrones, who, according to its definition, are the numerous people of Indigenous, mestizo, migrant and peasant origins who live in the cities. Its activism is located in what they term an ‘anti-racism with class consciousness’ which aims to combat racism at all levels, especially in the world of culture, while recognising the imbrication of racism and classism. Their initiatives include artistic interventions such as the one mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, as well as street actions, workshops and media and social media campaigns. As part of their collaboration with CARLA, in addition to visual works produced for our virtual exhibition, a book compiling their texts and initiatives was published (Identidad Marrón 2021).Footnote ¹²

In sum, over the last two decades, although white and European Argentina persists for certain sectors as a horizon of nationality that is impossible to renounce, recent years have exposed even more than before the inability of this narrative to serve as a point of reference for large parts of society. The horizon of anti-racism and the affirmation of non-whiteness as part of the nation are moving forward in a very evident way. In 2020, the anti-racist protests that the assassination of George Floyd detonated in several parts of the world also impacted Argentina, and public debate about the existence of structural racism in Argentina increased further.

As a coda, it is important to note that the election of far-right libertarian Javier Milei as president in late 2023 marks a concerning change of direction for Argentina’s trajectory towards greater racial recognition. Milei’s rhetoric actively celebrates European heritage and Argentina’s supposed exceptional whiteness in the Latin American context. His praise of controversial historical figures such as Julio Argentino Roca – responsible for the military campaigns against Indigenous peoples in Patagonia – combined with his ultra-free-market ideology and commitment to intensifying extractive industries suggests that Indigenous peoples and other racially marginalised groups, as well as the working class, will be disproportionately affected by his policies. The cultural and political gains achieved by anti-racist and ethnic minority organisations and artists over the past decades, and the resilient networks of resistance that have emerged, will surely be tested by this reactionary turn. The coming years will likely see increased tension between official discourses that attempt to restore myths of white Argentina and grassroots movements and artistic expressions that insist on the nation’s racial diversity and demand concrete actions against racism.

Conclusion

In this chapter we traced a long history of artistic productions whose relationship with racism we described using three categories: visibilising, vindicatory and overtly anti-racist. Although, as we have pointed out, it is only in recent years that an anti-racist culture stricto sensu has been consolidated in Argentina, we have proposed seeing certain vindicatory expressions as implicitly anti-racist, even though they have not always been interpreted by others as such. The peculiar manifestation in Argentina of racial hierarchies combined with the persistent denial that they existed – and, thus, that racism was a problem – forced us to pay attention to the oblique, allusive, non-confrontational ways that local creators tried to deal with the reality of ethnic-racial discrimination. In particular, the phenomenon of generic ‘popular Blackness’, not diasporic or related to any specific ethnicity, drove us to go beyond more easily identified anti-racist dynamics, such as the affirmation of minority identities and the defence of their rights. If anti-racism in Argentina is now expressed in a verbal, direct and confrontational way that seems totally novel, it is also true that a much older genealogy can be traced, which we have outlined here.

Having concluded this overview, it should be noted that a majority of the intellectuals and creators who put forward vindicatory views in public were white, middle-class males. Only in the current, more actively anti-racist, context do we see Indigenous, Black and marrón people, including women and trans and non-binary people, at the forefront of the debate. Neither Ricardo Rojas, Martín Castro, Antonio Tormo, Jorge Abelardo Ramos, Ricardo Carpani nor León Gieco are perceived in Argentina as non-white, nor were they lower class. However, alongside them, often in the same artistic fields, other artists whose bodies did manifest racial differences added their creations of anti-racist tenor. Among others, we have mentioned Buenaventura Luna, Atahualpa Yupanqui, Aimé Painé, Daniel Toro, Fidel Nadal, ‘La Mona’ Jiménez and Meta Guacha. There is nothing strange in this confluence: for a long time white people were in the best position to mount a defence of the cabecitas negras without paying the cost of being seen as such. But, in addition, the struggles for the ethnic profile of the nation were intertwined with class differences and with national politics, in particular with the Peronism versus anti-Peronism cleavage. This scenario was conducive to some white people becoming involved in the vindication of non-whiteness. The outcome of this struggle affected them directly.

Certainly, some of the creations contributed by white artists are purely visibilising, and ambivalences and blind spots can be found in relation to racial hierarchy: for example, paternalism, the reproduction of certain stereotypes and a tendency to visualise the subject in reference to rural but not urban spaces, or in the past rather than the present. There was also a certain preference for Indigeneity, with little room for Afro-descendants. But there was also room for vindicatory discourses with anti-racist potential. All in all, there is no doubt that the debates, sounds and images produced by some cultural products generated by white people contributed powerfully to making racism visible in Argentina and were part of the same scene that fed the creations of non-white artists.

Source: an online event, ‘Descolonizando las artes en Latinoamerica: Irrupciones antirracistas en el mundo del arte’ (Decolonising the Arts in Latin America: Anti-Racist Irruptions in the Art World) that took place on 29 July 2020, featuring Denilson Baniwa (Brazilian Indigenous artist), Miriam Álvarez (Mapuche theatre director), Ashanti Dinah Orozco (Afro-Colombian poet), Arissana Pataxó (Brazilian Indigenous artist), Alejandra Egido (Afro-Cuban and Afro-Argentine theatre director) and Rafael Palacios (Afro-Colombian dance company director). The event was in Spanish and was chaired by Carlos Correa Angulo, with assistance from Jamille Pinheiro Dias. The conversation can be accessed on CARLA’s YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/live/5-xs-DR7Yr0.